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LITERARY LIKINGS 






Richard Burton's Books 



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Literary Likings 

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Lothrop Publishing Company 
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LITERARY LIKINGS 



RICHARD BURTON 
















RIENDSHIPS 
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LIKING . . . 






George Eliot 



/ 

LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY 
BOSTON 



1 ht. UfeRAKY OK 
CONGRESS, 

Twe Copies Received 

JAN 2 1903 

flCopyrignt Entry 

CCASS XXc. n©. 

14- «f S o I 

COPY 8, 






NE W EDITION 



Copyright, 1898, 
By COPELAND 
AND DAY. 



Copyright, 1902, 
By LOTHROP 
PUBLISHING 
COMPANY. 



TO MY WIFE 



NOTE 

The papers making up this volume have 
with one or two exceptions appeared pre- 
viously in the columns of The Forum, The 
Atlantic, The North American Review, The 
New England Magazine, The Dial, Poet 
Lore, and other publications. The writer 
herewith acknowledges the courtesy of 
the editors in allowing him to reprint the 
essays. 



Contents 

Page 
Robert Louis Stevenson 3 
The Democratic and Aristocratic in Liter- 
ature 35 
Phases of Fiction 59 
I. The Predominance of the Novel 61 
II. The Persistence of the Romance 70 

III. Novels and Novel-readers 77 

IV. Permanent Types in Modern Fic- 

tion 91 
BjSrnson, Daudet, James : A Study in the 

Literary Time-spirit 107 

Ideals in American Literature 131 

Renaissance Pictures in Browning's Poetry 150 

Old English Poetry 173 

I. Old English Poetry 175 

II. Nature in Old English Poetry 183 

III. Woman in Old English Poetry 222 

Washington Irving's Services to American 

History 247 

A Battle Laureate 279 

The Renaissance in English 313 

American English 341 

Literature for Children 363 



Robert Louis Stevenson 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



I 

THE day has not yet come perhaps 
for an impartial judiciary on Robert 
Louis Stevenson. Contemporary criticism 
proverbially walks in Blind Man's Alley. 
But it is difficult not to speak of Steven- 
son, because, aside from his being a dis- 
tinctive writer of his day and generation, 
he was the best-loved personality among 
current English writers. It is as impos- 
sible not to enter into intimate, affectionate 
relations with him as it is in the case of 
Charles Lamb. Hence the chorus of 
praise, the many confessions of faith, that 
have followed upon his lamentable taking- 
off in the prime of his literary powers. 
Great makers of literature — men who 
mean much to us and do much for us — 
are by no means of necessity loved in 
proper person. Wordsworth or Goethe 
may have long been my literary idols: it 



4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

does not imply that I would have given 
a shilling to meet them in the flesh; 
whereas I would have paid blood and 
treasure for a half hour's chat with Steven- 
son. But love for the man and his work 
may not justify another attempt at appre- 
ciation. Some Frenchman has told us 
that one needs not only to love, but to 
love gracefully. Yet affection should be 
a sort of lamp for guidance in the dis- 
covery of quality ; moreover, the sympa- 
thetic author seems to say some special 
thing to one's self alone, and the admirer 
can but feel that certain phases of a writer's 
gift have not been indicated in true pro- 
portion or significance. 

I, 

The story of Stevenson's life will have 
a steadfast fascination. There was in it 
enough of variety and picturesqueness to 
catch the eye ; while, deeper down, one 
feels the pulse of the hero, the pathos of 
the struggle of a man bodily frail, intrepid 
of spirit, indomitably set upon brave ac- 
complishment. This has all the more of 
pathetic appeal because of the fine, high- 
bred reserve practised by Stevenson in his 






ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 5 

literary work, concerning his physical ail- 
ments. The only reference I recall in the 
whole range of his writings intended for 
publication (even in the Vailima Letters 
such allusions are curiously absent) is that 
in the charming paper called The Manse, 
where, speaking of a clergyman-ancestor 
who was of a sickly habit of body, the 
essayist remarks : " Now I often wonder 
what I have inherited from this old min- 
ister. I must suppose indeed that he was 
fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, 
though I never heard it maintained that 
either of us loved to hear them. He 
sought health in his youth in the Isle of 
Wight, and I have sought it in two hem- 
ispheres ; but whereas he found and 
kept it, I am still on the quest." The 
delicacy and simplicity of this make it 
very beautiful. Stevenson had no trace 
of that unpleasant egoism which makes a 
man whine over himself. The typical 
mood, private or public, is that expressed 
in the meeting with a friend, who, after a 
long separation, inquired of him what he 
had been about. " Well, my dear fellow," 
quoth Louis gayly, — it was at Bourne- 
mouth at a time when, in a phrase of his 



6 LITERARY LIKINGS 

own, he was " far through," — "I have 
been principally engaged in the business 
of dying, and you see I have made a 
failure of it." The pluck and gallantry 
of the answer are representative. 

Stevenson, a Scot of distinguished 
family, was a Bohemian, a world wan- 
derer ; one of the main denotements of 
his individuality is the way in which, 
through it all, despite the enforced cos- 
mopolitanism of his life, he remained a son 
of Scotland in blood and bone. He was 
a native of Scotia not so much in insular 
prejudices as in his cast of mind and play 
of emotion. An essay like The Foreigner 
at Home, the Scotch fictions led by that 
incomparable fragment Weir of Her mist on, 
are documents in the case. They stand 
for what was ingrain. Under the alien 
brilliancy of his dress and far below the 
facile adaptation to the customs of various 
climes, deep called unto deep in his nature, 
and steadily, faithfully he found his orien- 
tation in Edinburgh, city of his kinsmen 
and love. He was, after all, a clannish 
man to the last. Read The Tropics Vanish 
to realize it. Once set him 

" In the highlands, in the country places/ ' 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 7 

and " the spate of style " came, with the 
vision and the creative gust. With a 
nature less strong, this abiding quality 
would not have been. Examples among 
living writers lack not where cultured cos- 
mopolitanism has pretty much effaced race 
lines. It is only the sturdy men, the true 
independents of literature, who can resist 
the influence. Turgenef and Sienkiewicz 
are such individualities ; Stevenson is of 
their company. The lovableness of the 
man has somewhat obscured our sense of 
his strength in this regard. 

His death was commensurate with his 
life ; in accord with his wish, it had a rare 
and exquisite fitness : a sudden brave fin- 
ish, the pen still wet from an unfinished 
masterpiece. The stale tedium of the 
sick-room — against which in more than 
one essay he eloquently harangues — was 
spared him. He fell in mid-manhood in 
a creative flush of accomplishment, secure 
in the admiration of the world of readers, 
cherished in loving and loyal memory by 
those privileged to come into contact with 
him in the body. The affection of the 
Samoan natives, to whom in those few 
final years he became law-giver, counsellor, 



8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

friend, and Teller of Tales, is a black-letter 
index of his magnetism, his great gift of 
heart. From boyhood there was about 
him an atmosphere of refinement, an air of 
romantic grace: to be noted in his very 
clothes, in the eye-sparkle, the mobile 
play of the mouth, and the odd, whimsical, 
capricious elegance of his speech. His 
talk with his familiars, I am credibly in- 
formed, had the same quality as that of 
his choicest essays. It has been often re- 
marked, truly enough, that in an almost 
unique degree we note in Stevenson the 
survival of youthfulness. Deep in his soul 
the imperishable boy abided to the end. 
Child Play, The Lantern Bearers, A Child' s 
Garden, and most of the volume Virginibus 
Puerisque are in evidence. But to regard 
this quality as striking the keynote of his 
personality is wofully to err, to substitute 
the part for the whole. The assumption 
overlooks the complexity of the man, the 
many-sidedness of his nature — best sug- 
gested in his friend Henley's sonnet char- 
acterization : 

APPARITION. 

Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, 
Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 9 

Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with 

race, 
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as* the sea, 
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity — 
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
Of passion and impudence and energy. 
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : 
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, 
And something of the Shorter- Catechist. 

It is this very manifoldness of Steven- 
son which has thrown critics off the 
scent. Most writers of saliency take a 
position with the Left or Right in litera- 
ture. Stevenson possessed sympathies 
which drew him both ways. He was in 
some particulars a daring radical : in others 
an aristocrat, sitting with the extreme con- 
servatives. He is a literary force not at all 

>asy to catalogue or keep under a rubric. 

This becomes apparent only when the full 
content of his work has been surveyed. 

Ill 

The public knows him most familiarly 
through his fiction, nor should his con- 
tributions in this sort be minimized, espe- 



io LITERARY LIKINGS 

daily since here one gets his romanticism 
in process of demonstration. The whole- 
some reactionary influence of Stevenson's 
novels must be emphasized : in them his 
romantic theory is implicit, as it is explicit 
in some of his essays. From the morbid 
analysis, the petty detail, and the porno- 
graphic filth of that miscalled thing 
realism, his view hallo called us back to 
the happy hunting-grounds of the older 
story of incident, adventure, heroic per- 
sonages. He looked upon life (for the 
purposes of fiction) not only as a stage 
for high-hearted action, but as a sort of 
Continuous Performance full of change, 
bustle, and indefinite opportunities of 
amusement. While the novelist Steven- 
son is not all of Stevenson nor Stevenson 
at his deepest, the result is always wel- 
come, not seldom superb. With the in- 
creeping of the more subjective — as in 
the characteristic and too little known 
Prince Otto — comes a feeling on the part 
of the public that this is not in the typical 
vein ; hence the tale is not so garishly 
popular. The public has insisted indeed 
on regarding Stevenson as, par excellence, a 
romanticist only in the sense of one who 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON n 

tells an objective tale with little care for 
character as such ; which is ajl wrong, since 
in works like the Master of Ballantrae and 
Weir characterization is the prime motive; 
as it is, moreover, in such a creation as 
his Ebb Tide. This affixion of the ro- 
mantic tag to Stevenson's coat has given 
color to the idea of him as one who held 
his art as a means of pleasure-giving, 
nothing more. It may be observed in 
passing that this is by no means necessa- 
rily a low ideal ; it all depends upon your 
definition of the Protean word pleasure. 
But one who stops here with Stevenson is 
again off the scent. Even if we do not 
overstep the bounds of the novel, to read 
the stories ruminatingly and in their full 
content is to realize that the author is no 
more romantic than realistic ; that he is 
both objective and subjective ; Stevenson, 
in truth, sums up in his own person the 
proper relation of ideal to actual. His 
interest in life as fact and detail was 
immense, constant ; his inferences (in his 
fiction) were blithely romantic. His own 
sprightly genius formed the connecting 
link between those erroneously reckoned 
contradictions. 



iz LITERARY LIKINGS 

Stevenson's tales offer a kind of com- 
mon meeting-ground for readers of op- 
posing minds and creeds. The lovers of 
romance — a sight of folks is here ! — 
hail them gleefully, as a matter of course ; 
believers in " realism " yield such fiction 
at least a grudging approval — since, after 
all, they belong to humankind and enjoy 
what is enjoyable; while they who stickle 
for style are fed so high that they do 
willingly overlook so vulgar a thing as a 
rattling good plot. He who gets no satis- 
faction from Treasure Island or Kidnapped 
is a rarer bird than the Dodo. It is one 
of Stevenson's merits in such books that 
he administers ether to the critic who, 
boy-like, loses sight of technique in pleas- 
ure and, coming later out of the swoon, 
finds his proper joy in tasting quality and 
detecting the fine art of the performance. 
The sense of literature is forgotten for 
the nonce in the sense of the joy of life — 
the joy which Oswald in Ghosts longs for 
so piteously, — and which every son of 
woman who is in health and antecedent to 
his dotage demands at Fate's hands. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 13 

IV 

It is no belittlement of the fiction, 
however, to find the realest Stevenson, 
the most intimate exposure of himself, 
in the essays and poetry. It is hardly 
too much to say that one knows him not 
until he is known here. As an essayist 
Stevenson has the preserving qualities : 
charm, rich suggestiveness, wisdom lightly 
carried, distinction of manner. In the 
essay an author stands self-revealed ; he 
may mask behind other literary forms, 
in some measure ; but commonplaceness, 
vulgarity, thinness of nature, are in this 
kind instantly uncovered. The essay is 
for this reason a severe test. Character 
speaks in and through it ; the deepest and 
most winsome of a man comes out often 
in an essay ; he invites you into a confi- 
dential, quiet-furnished corner of his soul, 
there to listen to a conversation that is at 
once colloquial and confessional. And 
style, manner, is to the essay what water 
is to the fish : an element native to its 
progress. When talking of the essay it 
is inevitable to consider an author's way 
of saying things. Lowell once declared 



1 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

of Sidney Lanier that he had a genius for 
the happy word ; to few could the remark 
have been applied more fitly than to Ste- 
venson. His diction is not seldom spoken 
of as if its main feature were co-ordination 
or general harmony. It is true that it 
was admirably of a piece : he learned to 
find and keep the " essential note." Yet 
this is not his most noticeable hall- 
mark on the side of style. He was start- 
lingly felicitous as a coiner of word and 
phrase. Swift's narrow definition of style 
as the right words in the right places 
leaves untold the more important half of 
the story. The " right " word is well ; 
the correct writer acceptable. But there 
is something besides right and wrong in 
the selection and marshalling of words for 
literary purposes : there is good, better, 
best ; we must reckon with the unexpected 
and the delightsome. To use the right 
word is a sort of negative virtue : to use 
the creative word, — unlooked-for, a glad 
surprise to reader and writer alike, — that 
is quite another and higher thing. The 
difference between the two is a measure 
between talent and genius. Certain critics 
harp upon what they call the " inevitable " 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 15 

in diction. Pace Flaubert ! there is no 
such thing ; if there were, literature would 
be mathematics. Stevenson's pages have 
these frequent windfalls for us ; we mark 
the passages, and, returning on the page, 
smack our lips over the more leisurely 
second tasting. After all, it will not do 
to forget that to the truly elect of literature 
expression, if not all, is much ; the right 
turning of a phrase gives such an one a 
rapture greater than would the taking of 
a city. To some the joy will seem dis- 
proportionate, nugatory ; which is but 
additional proof of the exquisiteness of 
the experience. 

Now, one feels in reading Robert Louis 
Stevenson's finest papers — careless, in- 
imitable causeries on books, men, life, the 
moral verities — the theme is naught, 
handling everything — that here is the 
manner of a master; a man with infinite 
good temper, perfect breeding, and char- 
acter. Not to recognize the character, 
along with and over and above the style, 
is, in a way, to announce one's limitations. 
Follow the essays along the line of Steven- 
son's artistic and spiritual development ; 
from the slightly self-conscious cloth-of- 



1 6 LITERARY LIKINGS 

gold beauty of Ordered South, written at 
twenty-two, the marvel of a stripling, to the 
Christmas Sermon and Pulvis et Umbra, 
mellow, majestic deliverances, nobly reflec- 
tive and surcharged with the ethic temper ; 
and what you notice equally with the gain 
in aesthetic command is the broadening and 
deepening of the man's soul. Here is 
high thought solvent in emotion ; emotion 
held in check by art that has acquired a 
law-abiding freedom. And between these 
chronologic extremes lie what winsome 
and alluring things ! What exceptional 
gift, charm, distinction ! A side of the 
man's nature here blooms forth, hidden, 
or at least barely hinted, in the novels. 
His essential seriousness, his strong moral 
predilection, his hang for spiritual things, 
his poetry, his sublimated common-sense, 
— all of these qualities pervade the essay 
work, blending in the total effect as the 
juices of the new wine to make the subtle 
bouquet of the mellow vintage. With 
the exception of a very few of the latest 
poems, the intellectual maturity of Steven- 
son can nowhere else be seen so well. 

" Of Hamlet most of all " — how admir- 
able is Henley's stroke in its delicate 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 17 

felicity of characterization ! In depth and 
suggestion, in gentle melancholy that runs 
not into whining nor stagnant pessimism, 
that in no wise contradicts the sturdy 
courage of his more objective and imper- 
sonal writing, Stevenson is, in sooth, a 
Hamlet ; but the tricksy touch of Ariel 
and the whimsey of Puck are there, too, 
imparting tonic and lightness to his work. 
That the texture is slight, the subject 
matter by election light or discursive, 
none but the Philistine would speak for 
a reproach ; the fantasticality is a rich 
embroidery upon the enduring stuff of 
the thought. To call his themes far- 
fetched or trivial were to impugn Charles 
Lamb himself, or past masters in other 
tongues, like Montaigne or Richter, — 
the only possible excuse for discoursing 
of roast pig is the paper thereupon. No 
essayist ever got more out of nothing than 
did this frail son of Edinburgh. What a 
world of reminiscent tenderness, of shy 
ideality, of heart-piercing pathos, and of 
canny wisdom as well, is evoked, for 
example, by such a thing as The Lantern 
Bearers I How the reader is led to realize 
the common childlikeness of us all ! Or 



1 8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

in Beggars, with its picturesque flavor yet 
moral sanity, do we not feel behind the 
raillery an impassioned belief in the uni- 
versal brotherhood? No more delightful 
bit of egoism can be named than the 
Chapter on Dreams, a fairy tale, yet in full 
accord with modern psychology. One 
almost wonders that Stevenson did not 
anticipate Du Maurier and create Peter 
Ibbetson. In another vein, Ordered South, 
for its sane philosophy and pensive, 
dreamy loveliness of line and image can- 
not be fellowed in its particular genre ; one 
cries, in gloating over it, " Here indeed 
is your cloth-of-gold style ! " His, again, 
was the special gift for esoteric, desultory 
character limning, as in a slight paper like 
'The Manse, as well as in more avowed at- 
tempts at full-length portraiture. Steven- 
son may not have had the historian's full 
equipment, but certainly his was a genius 
for biography ; and biography is only his- 
tory on its intimate and informal side. He 
had a rare relish for character-presentation, 
whether the subject were an unknown 
Samoan native or a Robert Burns. His 
personages, imagined in fiction or trans- 
ferred from life, stood out saliently, in 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 19 

high relief. How his admiration for main 
men, his hero-worship, comes out in a 
thing like The English Admirals, or how 
gallantly he cries up the savor of life, and 
frowns upon the craven fear of death, in 
Aes Triplex! In that wonderful little paper 
Pulvis et Umbra may be seen perhaps at 
its most puissant our writer's picturesque 
power, natural poetry, and unhackneyed 
manner of thought in the face of the grave, 
great things of Life and Death. The com- 
monplace treatment of the theme of Evo- 
lution, and of man as its last consum- 
mate flower, is to drone along about the 
privilege of our high estate and the result- 
ant duties. Not so Stevenson ; contrari- 
wise, with the pathos of imaginative poetry 
he defines homo sapiens as " condemned to 
some nobility," striving along with all lower 
creation towards an " unattainable ideal." 
And he deems it would declare man a 
poltroon if he, "the reasoner, the wise in 
his own eyes," should show the white 
feather and not strive on with all other 
sentient life. " Let it be enough for 
faith that the whole creation groans in 
mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable 
constancy ; surely, not all in vain." It is 



zo LITERARY LIKINGS 






not skill or the revamping of the tradi- 
tional that produces essays like these, albeit 
the technique is elegant. A nature large, 
serious, vital, begot them. The debt to 
the past is but the debt any thinker or 
writer owes to his intellectual forbears — 
to dodge the debt is to announce one's self 
a literary bankrupt. A common miscon- 
ception in respect of Stevenson is that 
which, observing his technical power, the 
fine craftsmanship he displayed, stops 
short there. The Philistine can never get 
over or around Stevenson's indiscreetly 
frank avowal of his own literary methods, 
whence we hear now he "slogged at his 
trade" and "played the sedulous ape" to 
great writers during his novitiate. This is 
the confession of him who assumes that the 
untold half will not be forgotten, that the 
difference between the lehrjahre and meis- 
terjahre will be appreciated. Those who 
insist that Robert Louis Stevenson was 
an accomplished, graceful technician and 
nothing more are wide of the mark. They 
should be directed especially to certain 
sentences in the paper which tells of his 
obligation to chiefs of the craft — sentences 
deserving the higher accent of italics : 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 21 

" Perhaps I hear some one cry out : But this is 
not the way to be original ! It is not ; nor is there 
any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are 
born original, is there anything in this training 
that shall clip the wings of your originality. There 
can be none more original than Montaigne, neither 
could any be more unlike Cicero ; yet no craftsman 
can fail to see how much the one must have tried 
in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very 
type of a prime force in letters : he was of all 
men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself the 
imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is 
only from a school that we can expect to have good 
writers; it is almost invariably from a school that 
great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor 
is there anything here that should astonish the 
considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he 
truly prefers, the student should have tried all that 
are possible; before he can choose and preserve a 
fitting key for words, he should long have practised 
the literary scales; and it is only after years of 
such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions 
of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of 
phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he 
himself knowing what he wants to do and (within 
the narrow limit of a man's ability^) able to do it." 

Stevenson, then, had both the natal gift 
and the necessary training ; a conjunction 
evocative of superior results in literature. 
The false and shallow dilemma suggested 



22 LITERARY LIKINGS 

by the Horatian dictum is in his person 
exposed in all its fallaciousness. The 
ethic, in truth, might be called the dom- 
inant note in his essays and verse; the 
ethic atmosphere never heading up in 
unpleasant didactic thunder-storms. To 
miss this quality in him is not to know 
the man in any saving sense. The uni- 
versal ethic of comradery is what he 
preached; loving-kindness was his relig- 
ion. Above all he hated meanness, cru- 
elty, and cant. Yet his tolerant, sunshiny 
doctrine did not prevent a full recognition 
of the sterner aspects of the moral order. 
Else had he not been true to his Calvinist 
ancestors. He felt the working of Law as 
against Love, and there is an Old Testa- 
ment flavor to both thought and diction 
when he is upon such themes. The dic- 
tion at the finest is saved from mere 
rhetoric by this tendency. Take in illus- 
tration one of the cc purple patches " of 
his style, that superb apostrophe at the 
end of The Christmas Sermon : 

" When the time comes that he should 
go, there need be few illusions left about 
himself. Here lies one who meant well, 
tried a little ', failed much : surely that may 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 23 

be his epitaph, of which he need not be 
ashamed. Nor will he complain at the 
summons which calls a defeated soldier 
from the field : defeated, ay, if he were 
Paul or Marcus Aurelius — but if there 
is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, 
undishonored. The faith which sustained 
him in his lifelong blindness and lifelong 
disappointment will scarce even be required 
in this last formality of laying down his 
arms. Give him a march with his old 
bones ! There, out of the glorious sun- 
colored earth, out of the day and the dust 
and the ecstasy, — there goes another 
Faithful Failure!" 

Compare this with a typical passage 
from a master of prose eloquence like 
Ruskin — whose spiritual fervor no one 
disputes. I should maintain that there is 
an equal moral fervor and lift, and less 
suspicion of fine writing, in the later man ; 
which could only be when earnestness and 
honesty went hand in hand with talent. 
Stevenson does not allow sentimentality to 
emasculate his effect ; as Hazlitt said of 
another, his style is " bottomed on the 
vernacular." His feeling for idiom was 
wonderful. In fine, while the novels are 



24 LITERARY LIKINGS 

well worth a first reading, it is conceivable 
that one might hesitate at a second — at 
least in the case of the majority ; whereas 
the first reading of the essays is but an 
imperfect introduction to what shall be 
re-read times out of number, until it be- 
come a permanent possession. 



The ascription of the title of poet to an 
essayist and story-maker of such quality 
might seem more debatable. In spite of 
that unique achievement A Child 's Garden 
of Verses^ — at the time of its publication 
the only collection of poems in the tongue 
properly to be called child poetry in con- 
tradistinction from poetry about children 
for the delectation of older folk, — the 
critic might well have hesitated to award 
to Stevenson the proud names of singer 
and maker. But with the appearance of 
the final edition of his metrical work, per- 
mitting for the first time an opinion based 
upon a complete survey, such reserve be- 
comes unnecessary. The forty additional 
pieces of the final edition chiefly constitute 
the ground for the consideration of Steven- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 25 

son as a verse-writer of individuality and 
fine accomplishment. They show his gen- 
ius at its ripest, and are as interesting 
for their mastery of the art of verse as 
they are moving in the imaginative reve- 
lation of his deepest nature. For strength 
and beauty we should, on the whole, point 
to them as the Scotchman's most authentic 
gift to poetry — this in spite of the charm 
of the child-verse, or the blameless love- 
liness of a lyric like the Requiem. Taken 
as a group, the poems produced while 
Stevenson was in the South Seas stand 
for his maturest thought expressed in 
forms most likely to give it permanence. 
The verse referred to is embodied in the 
division entitled Songs of Travel and Other 
Verses. Certain things here, both in blank 
verse and lyric forms, must awaken the 
enthusiasm of any lover of fine poetry. 
They are to his verse what Weir of Her- 
miston is to his fiction — a noble culmina- 
tion of his powers. A number of these 
poems are to be associated because of a 
common melancholy of sentiment. As if 
prescient of the not far distant end, the 
singer longs himself back to Scotland, 
broods on old ways and days ; he an exile 



26 LITERARY LIKINGS 

fain to return there, at least to die. As 
strong a piece of blank verse as he has 
ever written, and one of the stateliest yet 
most touching in modern poetry, is an em- 
bodiment of this feeling — that beginning 
"The tropics vanish, " 

with its infinitely pathetic close : 

" The voice of generations dead 
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise, 
My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace, 
And, all mutation over, stretch me down 
In that denoted city of the dead." 

Akin to this is the apostrophe to Sidney 
Colvin, where he begs his friend, entering 
the British Museum to begin his daily 
toil, to send a thought to the South Seas, 
"so far, so foreign," and the beautifully 
tender To my Old Familiars^ in which the 
poet asseverates his belief that, in the 
very article of death, the scenes of home, 
" the emptiness of youth," 

"Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice 
Of discontent and rapture and despair, 

will seize on his mind and blot out all 
else. 

For sheer music-making, who has 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 27 

wrought lyrics more infectious than Bright 
is the Ring of Words and In the Highlands, 
in the Country Places ? There is a con- 
summate perfection in such work that 
associates its writer with Poe and Swin- 
burne ; the loveliness of it is not for the 
moment's pleasure — it haunts and clings. 
Stevenson's creed is as nobly expressed in 
the following as is Kipling's in the Envoy, 
which closes ^he Seven Seas: 

YOUTH AND LOVE. 

" Once only by the garden gate 

Our lips we joined and parted. 
I must fulfil an empty fate 
And travel the uncharted. 

" Hail and farewell ! I must arise, 
Leave here the fatted cattle, 
And paint on foreign lands and skies 
My Odyssey of battle. 

" The untented Kosmos my abode, 
I pass, a wilful stranger : 
My mistress still the open road 
And the bright eyes of danger. 

" Come ill or well, the cross, the crown, 
The rainbow or the thunder, 
I fling my soul and body down 
For God to plough them under." 



28 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Stevenson's blank verse, as seen in the 
pieces mentioned and in other choice ex- 
amples, had become a splendid and dis- 
tinctive feature of his literary power. It 
possesses a Shakespearean virility and 
felicity of diction, and a varied music 
through the skilful shifting of the caesura 
and an inerrant gift for tone-color, which, 
on the technical side, made it admirable. 
Then, for thought-stuff, it embodies, as I 
have said, the essential Stevenson, the 
Stevenson seen in Pulvis et Umbra ; a 
brooding, analytic, modern mind, conscious 
of the awful antinomies of existence, yet 
hanging on to a shred of hope, courageous 
in the face of an apparently heartless fate. 
Intellectually, he was with J. A. Symonds, 
Richard Jefferies, Leslie Stephen, W. E. 
Henley, — an agnostic; temperamentally, 
artistically, an optimist — or at least, like 
George Eliot, a meliorist. 

Then, still thinking of the poems which 
outbreathe nostalgia, that addressed to 
Crockett deserves a high place among 
the rhymed pieces : 

" Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain 

are flying ; 
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now." 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 29 

Again comes the deep desire, the refrain 
recurrent in so muc*h of the latest utter- 
ance : 

" Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, 
Hills of home!" 

till the sympathetic reader is chilled with 
the thought that his heartfelt longing was 
not gratified. That the minor note in 
these poems was rooted in a radical feeling 
that his end was fast drawing nigh, there 
are many little signs, some in The Vailima 
Letters, some in the verse. This brief 
blank-verse poem plainly voices the pre- 
sentiment : 

"The morning drum-call on my eager ear 
Thrills unforgotten yet ; the morning dew- 
Lies yet undried along my field of noon. 
But now I pause at whiles in what I do 
And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear 
(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon. ,, 

Among the lyrics, what a noble poem is 
Tropic Rain, with its leaping measures, its 
onomatopoetic effects, and, more than all, 
its brave resolution to see good in evil, 
blenching at naught. That final stanza 
surely is one of the most satisfying, most 
uplifting in verse of our time : 



3 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

"And methought that beauty and terror are only one, 

not two ; 
And the world has room for love and death and 

thunder and dew ; 
And all the sinews of Hell slumber in summer air ; 
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the 

rock is fair. 
Beneficent streams of tears follow the finger of pain, 
And out of the cloud that smites beneficent rivers of 



Or look at Mater Triumphans, a superb 
thing of a verity, destined to thrill 
mothers many like a trumpet-blast. The 
whole epic of maternity is expressed in 
those two stanzas, and the resonance of 
the words carries with it the mother-pride 
in offspring conquering all weakness, pain, 
and fear. In ihe Woodman Stevenson's 
sense of the might of nature and the im- 
pudent meddling of man, self-elected lord 
of natural phenomena, — a sentiment also 
finely expressed in prose in The Vailima 
Letters, — is embodied in a poem contain- 
ing much strong, picturesque description 
and an underlying sermon on struggle as 
the one great law of all existence. Every- 
thing preys on everything else, he says, 
and man must do likewise. This is the 
sterner side of his appreciation of the 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 31 

century's creed of the survival of the 
fittest. The realization at times weighs 
him down. Yet, following Huxley's sug- 
gestion that man must combat, not imi- 
tate, the cosmic process, Stevenson's 
doctrine more often is that of gentleness 
and love. In his most inspired moods 
and utterances he yearns for a solution 
leaving room for a belief in the good. 
This comes out superbly in what is, to 
my mind, the greatest poem of the group, 
and one that Browning alone can rival. 
If 'This were Faith is indeed Browning- 
esque in its rugged power, its splendidly 
nervous lilt, its intense ethical quality. 
The pathos of it is piercing ; it reveals the 
intellectual attitude and the spiritual state 
of one of the thoughtfullest, bravest, hon- 
estest of the chiefs of literature. In spite 
of having seen God's 

" evil doom 
In Golgotha and Khartoum," 

he hopes that the resolve to play a 
soldier's part, the will to cling on to 

"The half of a broken hope for a pillow at night, 
That somehow the right is the right 

And the smooth shall bloom from the rough," 



32 LITERARY LIKINGS 

is enough for justification, even if faith 
can no farther go in the face of the seem- 
ing triumph of anti-Christ. The irre- 
sistible, vibrant sweep of the stirring cry- 
shows it came hot from the heart, and 
among spiritual registrations in verse it 
must have a high place. There are other 
notable things — The Lost Occasion, He 
Hears with Gladdened Heart the Thunder , 
and the final Evensong, instinct with a 
tranquil resignation, a "twilight piece," — 
among these late poems, with what may 
be called the "essential Stevenson" in 
them. Premonitions of the end come 
frequently during the last year, but, in 
spite of the wish, when the mood was on 
him, to revisit friends and the homeland, 
with the feeling that it were good to lie 
there, once at least it came to him that his 
Samoan isle was no ill abiding-place for 
his body. In reading An End of Travel, 
with its striking fifth line, one is comforted 
that he had the journey-end herein imag- 
ined and limned in lovely verse : 

" Let now your soul in this substantial world 

Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored ; 

This spectacle immutably from now 

The picture in your eye ; and when time strikes, 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 33 

And the green scene goes on the instant blind, 
The ultimate helpers, where your horse to-day 
Conveyed you, dreaming, bear your body dead." 

It must be a solace to every true lover of 
Stevenson that in his case the green scene 
did, literally, go on the instant blind, so 
that he and his were spared the droning 
misery of a long sickness. 

The world will not let die such imagina- 
tive writing as is contained in this precious 
addendum to the verse of Robert Louis 
Stevenson. Noble literature it is, and 
very revelatory of the man, intensely auto- 
biographic. The poems make clearer the 
good fight he fought, the captain he was, 
true to his own exhortation : 

" bid me play 
The hero in the coming day ! ' ' 

VI 

Coelum non animum. To change one's 
sky is not to change one's mind about 
Stevenson or his work. This meditation 
upon him was begun amidst the hustle 
and roar of a great city. The tragic cries 
of newsboys hawking war "extras" ruf- 
fled the hours. As if in consonance with 



34 LITERARY LIKINGS 

political events, the skies were sullen, the 
weather had a bleak, untimely countenance. 
All was unrest, struggle, dubiety. I finish 
it in the divine promise of a soft, bright 
May day far up in the New Hampshire 
hill-country. The tender spring-green is 
on bush and tree, the air odorous with 
budding things. But, tested here or 
there, Stevenson's power abides : he is 
not for a certain mood or environment 
alone. The full appreciation of him is 
an esoteric matter : granted. One can 
laud his technic and admit his gifts, yet 
leave the choicest unsuspected. On the 
other hand, if admiration errs it also testi- 
fies to power. The use of superlatives in 
critical appreciation has a sort of justifica- 
tion ; for the superlative is but the posi- 
tive degree of the emotions. Yet it would 
seem to a contemporary that there is in 
him something of the classic, by virtue of 
which he is likely to persist as an author 
of unfading attraction. For he has offered 
two most acceptable hostages to Time : 
an impeccable art and a character piquant, 
wholesome, distinctive, and strong. 



The Democratic and Aristocratic in 
Literature 



THE DEMOCRATIC AND ARIS- 
TOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 



I 

IT is one of Time's curious paradoxes 
that poetry, originally most popular and 
democratic of literary products, should 
come to be regarded as farthest removed 
from common interest and apprehension. 
In the history of all peoples the dawn of 
the artistic expression gives us folk-made 
epics ; and ballads, which are epics in 
little, are sung by the untutored and the 
illiterate of the race. Homer, Beowulf, 
the Norse Sagas and Eddas, the German 
Hildebrand, the Finnish Kalevala, are not 
the work of the self-conscious litterateur 
armed cap-a-pie with technique and appeal- 
ing to an audience limited to those of 
somewhere the same degree of culture. 
Nay, rooting in the dance and the real 
music of instruments, testifying to the 
universal love of story-telling and for 



38 LITERARY LIKINGS 

rhythmic intervals, these earlier monu- 
ments are no more literary, in the modern 
sense, than was Pippa when morning-glad 
she carolled her dew-pearl of a lyric. 

Many of these old poems, indeed, were 
not for centuries written down, and so 
were not literary in the derivational mean- 
ing of the word. The idea of the written 
song and story is a secondary one, and in 
a way unfortunate, obscuring, as it does, 
the thoroughly popular origin of these 
people-births. Professor Jebb notes this 
in respect of Greek poetry. " Writing," 
he says, " was indeed the instrument by 
which the poems were preserved and trans- 
mitted. . . . But it belonged to the 
very essence of all the great poetry that it 
appealed to hearers rather than to readers. 
The Greeks of the classical period were 
eager listeners and talkers ; they delighted 
in lively conversation and subtle discus- 
sion, but they were not great students of 
books. What they felt in regard to the 
poet can be best understood by comparing 
it with the feeling which not they alone, 
but all people, have in regard to the orator 
and the preacher." This will take some 
superficial students of the noblest litera 



me 
ra- 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 39 

ture of antiquity with surprise ; yet it is 
not only true of Greece, but of all early 
literatures. 

" Poetry is the mother-tongue of man," 
said a great German critic ; and the remark 
is far less figurative than at first appears. 
Every child, with its fondness for Mother 
Goose jingles and wonder-tales, reminds 
the thoughtful man of the childhood of 
the race, when ratiocination was not, and 
song was more natural than syllogism. 
Emotional speech (and poetry par excellence 
comes under the rubric) antedates the more 
intellectual, non-emotional speech of man 
by centuries, each nation following a uni- 
versal law of evolution and developing its 
literature in accordance therewith. It is 
with this in mind that Sir Philip Sidney 
blames those who " inveigh against Poetry," 
because they " seek to deface that which 
in the noblest nations and languages that 
are known hath been the first light-giver 
to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk 
little by little enabled them to feed after- 
wards of tougher knowledges." 

Nobody would deny that our Anglo- 
Saxon forefathers were in manner of life, 
and because of their stage of development, 



4 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

a practical, utilitarian folk. Yet the Old 
English bard who stood in the hall and, 
harp at breast, chanted the hero-deeds of 
the king was a personage hardly second in 
importance to the chief himself. He was 
not regarded by the men of the clan, the 
retainers in their armor gathering about 
the scald to hearken and hear his song, as 
a moonstruck, effeminate individual, to be 
tolerated at the best — patronized rather 
than approved. Contrariwise, his place of 
honor was assured, his position enviable 
for its emoluments and distinction. The 
direct and cogent effect of his appeal upon 
those rough warriors, feasting after their 
fight, was well understood; the bard stirred 
them to prowess, and was the expres- 
sion of their battle-field deeds and aspira- 
tions. The most matter-of-fact weapon- 
men would, we may suppose, never have 
dreamed of questioning the poet's func- 
tion in this sort, or of belittling his pro- 
fession and place in their social life. His 
relation thereto was as immediate as was 
the blacksmith's ; while his rank was such 
as to give him exceptional dignity and 
prominence. 

Poetry, as Vico declared, was the first 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 41 

form of wisdom — the wisdom that was 
felt and imagined, not thought and 
reasoned ; hence the poet was not the 
dreamer so much as the sage and inter- 
preter of the people to the people — a 
democratic function, and one to be com- 
prehended by all. The modern attitude, 
popular if not critical, toward verse — we 
prefer to dub in this dubious fashion all 
present-day product which has not through 
fame been adjudicated the rank of poetry 
— is to be explained, first by the fact that 
reasoned thought, not emotional thought, 
is generally regarded as the vehicle for the 
conveyance of wisdom ; and second, by the 
false distinction set up by the tyranny of 
the written and later the printed word, 
making rhythm and rhyme the business of 
the cultured few, and adjuncts of thought 
and feeling unrelated to the popular mind 
and heart. It is not unnatural that as 
society becomes civilized, with the birth of 
institutions, the division of occupations, 
and the rise of reflective differentia in all 
directions, incidental to a more self-con- 
scious and sophisticated age, intellectual 
processes and results should come to be 
regarded as of more authority and value 



42 LITERARY LIKINGS 

than emotional states and the spontaneous 
product of feeling. In truth, this slow 
shift of ideal is always the condition and 
the measure of natural evolution into 
higher social life. Yet it may be that in 
the course of time, when reflection 
threatens to swamp creation, it is fitting to 
call a halt — to remind a people blase with 
the consciousness of the mechanism of all 
things that the disestimation of man's 
natural, emotive side is dangerous, and 
can be carried too far; it may choke great 
creative efforts, hush the divine sound of 
song. Nay, it may further be said that 
the modern world is now in a mood to 
react in favor of spontaneity ; sick of the 
fetish-worship of mere intellect, it gladly 
welcomes the childlike qualities of the 
unsophisticate heart. The present craze 
for folk-poets, voicing in the language of 
the commonalty the popular needs and 
ideals, makes for this conclusion ; so too 
does the diligent study of the people songs 
and ballads of Europe and the East. 
Modern psychological research leads the 
same way, teaching that the emotions of 
humanity play a larger part, and a more 
fruitful, in our growth than the mere intel- 
lectuals, and are of more ancient lineage. 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 43 

One recalls Lecky's deep line, " We 
owe more to our illusions than to our 
knowledge." It is the very man surfeited 
with philosophy, science, and history who 
flies to poetry for a breath of the glad, 
young, irresponsible dawn of the world. 
And so, mayhap, by learning the true 
place and power of song and the true valid- 
ity of instinct, all classes may be brought 
back to a realization of its democratic 
nature. - It has been overlooked that the 
true barrier which divides humble from 
high, the illiterate from the literati, is not 
such a naive child of feeling as Poetry, but 
the stern, cold younger brother, Ratiocina- 
tion. Thought is essentially aristocratic ; 
emotion is democratic the globe over; 
one touch of nature makes the whole 
world kin. And song, above everything 
else, is the direct and impulsive issue of 
emotion. If the arbitrary and accidental 
nature of literature — meaning thereby the 
written word — once be securely lodged 
in mind, the truth as to the royal yet 
popular part played by the emotions in 
instinctive creation will be more widely 
apprehended. 

Yet how surely is literature, as thus ex- 



44 LITERARY LIKINGS 

plained, a people-product, still capable, 
however much it may have been appro- 
priated by the select and made to seem 
almost a caste privilege, of being a joy to 
all ; how surely is poetry, most plebeian 
of literary divisions in birth and upbring- 
ing, a form to-day for the most unreserved 
and general acceptance, if the world but 
will; the hard-and-fast line which marks 
off the literary from common folk and 
common interests is an artificial one. 

This misconception of literature in gen- 
eral, and of verse in particular, is to be 
overcome mainly in two ways : by a broader 
and more wholesome appeal to humanity 
on the part of the makers of literature ; 
and by the cultivation of their emotional 
and imaginative natures by the so-called 
practical community. The blame of the 
present state of things certainly lies with 
the litterateurs themselves in some meas- 
ure. A movement like that of the French 
Symbolist school of poets tends to beget 
the impression that poetry is a vague, 
unrelated maundering of sound, color, and 
suggestion in language, utterly outside of 
the realities of life. "Take a few ad- 
verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, substan- 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 45 

tives, and adjectives," says a distinguished 
French singer of another and nobler school, 
" shake them all up together, and you will 
have symbolism ; " and this is hardly an 
exaggeration of some of the recent work 
done under that name. It has been a 
fashion in more than one country to deem 
literature meritorious in exact proportion 
as it was recondite, obscure, precious, or 
narrow. Let literature become exclusive 
or technical, and the breath of life goes 
out of it, whatever the temporary activity 
into which it may be galvanized. No one 
can wonder that plain people are given 
pause before the meaningless rhythmic 
rhapsodies of Swinburne or the occult 
mysticism of a Mallarme'; it would be an 
egregious mistake to fly to the conclusion 
that such folk are atrophied on the side 
of emotional literature. On the contrary, 
they will be quick to respond to the poem 
or story which has clear thought, true feel- 
ing, and a sane atmosphere. The trouble 
with much of current verse is, that it 
substitutes empty art, or metaphysics, or 
specialization, or the hyper-refinements 
of a finicky, lop-sided culture for the 
wholeness and heartiness of more natural 



46 LITERARY LIKINGS 

conditions. It is safe to say that if our 
writers cultivate a sound habit of body and 
a pure habit of mind, these abuses and 
effeminacies which bring their art into ill- 
repute, and surely make misunderstand- 
ings, will die from disuse. A sick man in 
literature, who lets his sickness get into his 
work, is not a boon, but a nuisance. Meet 
the age half way, O man of letters ; realize 
the dignity and breadth of your calling ; 
reckon it as manly to be nothing less than 
vital and vigorous in your work, eschewing 
the night-side of your craft as too patho- 
logical for humanity's profit or your own 
well-being ! So will you have done your 
part, and may rest from your labors satis- 
fied that your talent has not been wasted, 
and sure that your generation will not be 
thankless. 

But on the side of the public, too, there 
is a duty. This may be expressed by say- 
ing that common folk (and the world in 
general makes no pretence to be outside 
this category) must cultivate the higher- 
practical ; the practical which ministers to 
the heart and soul, and so to nobler liv- 
ing, while it may be impractical so far as 
material and immediate gain is concerned. 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 47 

People at large favor appeals to their 
psychical natures ; they enjoy stories, songs, 
scenery, art which reproducesand idealizes 
all that side of life. Scratch a Christian- 
ized Turk, it is said, and you will find a 
Mohammedan ; scratch a practical man, 
and you will find a big boy responsive to 
the things of the spirit, though maybe 
ashamed to own it. Hence the men and 
women for whom sound, pure-hearted 
literature is written are, as a rule, quite 
ready to meet it half way. They must 
not be slow to encourage what is given 
them of sweet and inspirational ; nor must 
they be tricked into the fallacious modern 
notion that emotion is puerile and waste 
time, that intellectual wrestling is the most 
glorious outcome of latter-day develop- 
ment. So far is this last from being true 
that all genuine culture (as contradistin- 
guished from knowledge) is a thing of 
the emotional and imaginative parts of 
human consciousness. Some other modern 
nations — the Germans, for example — 
are nearer the right in their frank avow- 
ment of the worth of sentiment and the 
prominence in daily life they give to music 
— above all other arts offspring of the 



48 LITERARY LIKINGS 

feelings. A public, a people, which does 
not count as ill spent an hour stolen 
from the workaday world to listen to a 
symphony concert or a reading from the 
poets is the only fruitful environment for 
the artist in all those arts which are indis- 
solubly bound by the kin-tie of creative 
emotion. Withdraw the audience, and ' 
the makers of art and literature fatten on 
their own idiosyncrasies, become decadent, 
symbolic, or whatever be the descriptive 
phrase naming the fad of the fleeting day. 
With these inter-relations between poetry 
and the public realized, with the demo- 
cratic birth of the former set before the eyes 
and brought home to the consciousness by 
argument and illustration, it should not be 
Utopian to hope for a reinvestiture of 
verse in the suffrages, not of a class, but 
of a people, the result being greater joy- 
ance and a swifter progress in the ameliora- 
tions and upliftings of our civilization. 



II 






There is always a reverse side to human 
shields : we must touch this topic in another 
aspect ere we leave it. While the fact of 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 49 

democratic origin and the popular nature of 
literature and of its highest division, verse, 
is perfectly true and in need of reiteration, 
it happens, nevertheless, that it is possible 
to lay too much stress upon the naive 
folk-element in letters, to the obscuration 
of truth. At times, and especially in an 
over-cultured and reflective age, a sort of 
preciosity is thrown around a literary peo- 
ple-product, and the suppressed premise 
appears to be a belief that all virtue lies in 
the haphazard outcome of non-literary and 
careless workers in a primitive art. That 
the breath of life is often in such work, 
and absent from the polished efforts of self- 
conscious poetasters and essay-mongers may 
be readily conceded ; but it is not the less 
a fact that art is long, a slow, tortuous evo- 
lution moving from crude to perfect, and 
from the childishly, monotonously simple 
to the fascinatingly complex. Its latter 
end is better than its first. 

The earlier and more artless product of 
a given nation, it must be borne in mind, 
has a dual value, to be separated carefully 
into its component parts in any fruitful 
analysis. First, there is its historical sig- 
nificance, calling for our appreciation as a 



5o LITERARY LIKINGS 

link in a chain, or as a comparatively unim- 
portant parent of a greater offspring. And 
then, second, there is its value as literature 
per se> aside from all question of evolu- 
tional place and importance in a line of 
causation. Too often these tests are con- 
fused, and much cloudy or wild criticism 
results. For example : the immense 
amount of research and critical judgment 
which have been expended upon the ballad 
forms of their older native literatures, by 
English and German scholars respectively, 
is right and proper when the historic posi- 
tion of the ballad is in view, but would be 
almost absurd if the investigation were 
for literary excellence alone ; and, in con- 
sequence, one notices a fetish worship of 
these rough, amorphous attempts at song 
and narration, among people who ignore 
the merits of modern work in the same 
genre infinitely superior in all particulars 
which go to make poetry. 

The story of the modern attitude toward 
the Elizabethan drama is again an illus- 
tration. For a while it was neglected as 
rude and contemptible; even the apprecia- 
tion of a Dryden or a Pope being touched 
with the condescension of one viewing the 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 51 

product from a superior height. But with 
the present century we get a truer aper$u, 
and the play-making of Shakespeare and 
his fellows is hailed as the Golden Age of 
our native drama. In the superlatives of 
praise now deemed proper for the latter- 
day critic in treating of this product lurks 
a peril for those who read as they run, and 
perhaps for the critic-class itself. Those 
who take their opinions at second-hand will 
conclude that because the greatest poetry 
of our tongue was written by the matchless 
Shakespeare, by Marlowe of the mighty 
line, sweet-toned Ford, mournful Webster, 
and the rest of the seventeenth-century 
immortals, — because their dramatic output 
is constantly and critically referred to as 
standing by itself, the chief glory of our 
native literature, — therefore the best play- 
making in our literary history was done 
between the days of Elizabeth and the 
second James. And this conclusion would 
be an egregious mistake. As literature, 
that virile and flamboyant product is doubt- 
less above all else before and since ; but 
as drama regarded as a form distinct from 
other forms, and having a technique of its 
own, the later work of Sheridan and Gold- 



52 LITERARY LIKINGS 

smith, say, or far more that of Ibsen, is 
superior by an infinity of stage-craft and 
technical art. Yet so loosely has the un- 
bounded laudation of the Elizabethans 
been construed that even this statement, 
precise as to fact and mild in manner, may 
seem to some whimsical or iconoclastic. 
Great as imaginative literature, great indeed 
as drama when compared with the prece- 
dent miracles and mysteries, horse- farce 
and stilted classicalities, out of which it 
evolved, the plays of Shakespeare and his 
mates are not good in the sense and to the 
degree that those of Sardou, Ibsen, Pinero, 
and Sudermann are good. In the evolu- 
tion of the play as an organic form in 
literature, these later men stand on a van- 
tage-ground and are of the sort to make 
use of it. We have here, in short, the 
confusion arising from the subtle power 
exercised by a mighty, but relatively inar- 
tistic art-product, to which is imputed a 
vicarious virtue by reason of youth and 
unsophistication ; because it is more " spon- 
taneous," less consciously articulated. 
Had Shakespeare, it is said, weighed and 
pruned and filed his figures, we should 
have had fewer pleonasms and euphuisms 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 53 

perchance, but less authentic raptures as 
well. The fallacy of the folk-cult is here, 
though in modified form. Shakespeare, 
the Elizabethans at large, were great liter- 
ary creators and at times great artists ; and 
their most pronounced triumphs will be 
found to be at one inevitably with their 
truest art — a significant fact. It is un- 
philosophic to deify the untutored side of 
their power as if therein lay the secret of 
all its potency and charm. 

That there is a popular quality, a wild, 
natural music, in much of the early effort 
in the literary evolution of a race cannot 
be gainsaid. At the same time, this 
simple truth may be — nay, is — elevated 
into a doctrine, with the result of blinding 
us to relative excellencies, and putting a 
more developed and finer art under a 
cloud. Literature, one must be ever re- 
peating, is an art primarily and chiefly ; it 
is extremely doubtful if the songs and 
ballads of the most unsophisticate age 
which history records were the output of 
pure inspiration, with no thought of manner 
or form. Merely because we fall in with 
a cruder product does not at all prove 
spontaneity : it indicates only that the art 



54 LITERARY LIKINGS 

is less defined and positive ; the inspira- 
tion is a matter for subjective tests. Many 
early literatures, once ranked as crude 
and undeveloped, now are known to be 
thoroughly artistic : thus, it used to be a 
stock remark in text-books of English 
literature to call the Anglo-Saxon poetry 
rough and barbarous. To-day every 
student of it is aware that it is highly 
evolved and consciously artistic. A milk- 
maid may labor more over a doggerel qua- 
train bearing the smutted finger-marks of 
folk-verse than a trained poet over his 
sonnet, which by grace of long experience 
he writes with no restricting sense of its 
intricacies of construction. No sudden 
gust of creative energy will overcome 
ignorance in manipulating unfamiliar 
material. An easy pitfall, this ; and, we 
venture to think, one into which many 
ballad-idolaters have fallen. 

To begin with, then, crudeness and 
spontaneity are not synonyms. Next, 
since art is an organic evolution taking on 
new beauties and decorations in its course 
of development, it is fair to say that, even 
conceding an increase in self-consciousness, 
the gains far outweigh the losses, and are 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 55 

to be rejoiced over, not neglected for 
indulgence in a retrospective wail over a 
more or less illusory primitive quality, 
which when analyzed resolves itself into 
two parts dross to one of true metal. The 
permanently great art of the nations has 
not been the rough-hewn, impulsive efforts 
of demi-civilized creatures, but the wise 
and splendid product — inspirational, yet 
sternly law-abiding and artistic — of the 
aristocrats of letters — those to the purple 
born. Homer was not a lawless maker of 
poems, but a consummate craftsman ; so 
was Dante, so also Shakespeare ; Goethe 
and Heine, Musset and Hugo, Keats and 
Tennyson, — none of these lacked spon- 
taneity, inspiration ; but they were artists 
ad unguem. No fallacy is more irritating 
to one familiar with the exigencies and 
demands of art than that which fondly 
fancies that inspiration spells a total lack 
of training and a tyro's spurt of common- 
place self-expression. Editors are aware, 
to their daily sorrow, of the type of con- 
tributor who sends his first attempt for 
publication with the assurance that it was 
"inspired," penned under compulsion in 
the mid-watches of the night, a thing 



56 LITERARY LIKINGS 

unique in the writer's experience. The 
one sure and changeless family-trait of 
all such writing is its worthlessness ; and 
some at least of the poetic seizures of 
the past, dubbed wonderful because so 
delightfully free from self-conscious effort, 
belong to this same category. 

It is well, then, to have two denotements 
in mind concerning art : that in its finest 
and richest forms it implies training, tech- 
nique, evolution, and must be, therefore, 
in a sense, self-knowing and self-judging; 
and again, that the moment of creation 
is the moment of inspiration with Goethe 
and Tennyson as with Master Ballad- 
Monger. Moreover, inspiration for in- 
spiration, that of the trained and rounded 
artist will be to that of the uncultured 
songman as gold to pinchbeck. The 
worst feature, in sooth, of this pseudo- 
worship of folk-literature is its affectation. 
The refined critic, who goes into spasms 
of admiration over the halting stanzas 
and bizarre metaphors of some bygone 
lyric, is more often than not keenly alive 
to all that makes art precious and dis- 
tinctive : he forces himself into enthu- 
siasm here, rather than honestly feels it ; 



DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 57 

he has a tradition of eulogium on his neck, 
like an Old Man of the Sea.- And so he 
praises out of all proportion, and ignores 
the gracious gains and enrichments of 
contemporaneous art. No one well read 
in, and appreciative of, the best modern 
English verse can have to do with the 
early English ballads without frequent 
irritation and a sense of manifold, some- 
times of amazing, defects, and this de- 
spite much pleasure and stimulation. 
And since honesty is the beginning of 
all wisdom, in literary apperception as 
elsewhere, it is well to make this point 
pike-staff plain. 

So the two sides of the matter emerge 
from our to-and-fro of argument and 
illustration. We see (it may be hoped) 
the wrong in deeming literature aristo- 
cratic in the sense that it is exclusive, 
unsympathetic* to common needs and 
common moods, the trick of the spe- 
cialist and nothing more, — this view 
overlooking the unliterary, democratic 
genesis of all literature, and especially of 
poetry, its first and fairest child. But 
we see too, in seeming though not es- 
sential contradiction to this, that litera- 



58 LITERARY LIKINGS 

ture is an art like any other ; that the 
people-made song or story is a simpler, 
cruder, less artistic thing than the per- 
fected lyric, novel, or play into which it 
shall in the course of centuries be de- 
veloped ; and that a false cult of the raw 
for its rawness' sake may easily spring 
up and work mischief. With both of 
these truths understood and applied, the 
student, the reader, the amateur, or the 
literary worker is in a position to be 
tolerant, yet keen — broadly appreciative, 
yet genuinely critical. He will feel that 
literature should be and can be a general 
joy, not a privilege of the select few ; 
and he will rejoice in good literature, 
whether early or late, whether the ballad 
made in the morning of history or the 
psychologic marvel of a modern master. 
Only he will graduate all literary pro- 
duction according to its kind and degree 
of excellence, and will ever discriminate 
between faddish fashions and the eternal 
verities of Art. 



Phases of Fiction 



I 

THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE 
NOVEL 

¥ 

WHEN a certain division of literature 
is, for historical reasons, dominant 
in current literary production, it is like a 
drag-net which ensnares divers sorts of 
fish. It attracts not only the natural 
makers in that form, but others whose 
gifts fit them better for some other work, 
but who cannot resist the centripetal pull 
of this most popular activity. Thus, in 
the Elizabethan days the drama was the 
type of literature which represented the 
age, most interested the public, and con- 
sequently engaged the main attention of 
the begetters of literary masterpieces. 
And hence it is that we meet with men 
like Peele, Greene, and Lodge, and, later, 
Cartwright and Shirley, whose call to play- 
making was not imperative, whose work 
was more or less imitative. Had the 



62 LITERARY LIKINGS 

mode of the day in letters demanded the 
essay or the novel, they would as readily 
have turned in those directions. Peele 
was naturally a superior controversialist, 
Lodge could write so exquisite a prose 
pastoral as Rosalind, — whence Shake- 
speare drew his lovely As Tou Like It> 
— and Shirley had powers as a lyrist ex- 
ampled in so dainty a song as that entitled 
A Lullaby, 

At present the novel is the all-engulf- 
ing literary form. Alphonse Daudet has 
asked of late : " What shall be the novel, 
the literature, of the future?" — as if the 
two terms were co-terminous and inter- 
changeable. Fiction has made sad inroads 
upon the ancient and honorable champaign 
of Poetry ; the essay is as naught to it in 
popularity and applause ; while even the 
stern historian tries to give his chronicle of 
the past, of " old, unhappy far-off things," 
a narrative interest, and some boldly throw 
their history into the guise of an historical 
romance, albeit their purpose is not artistic, 
but didactic, — the imparting of knowledge 
rather than the giving of pleasure. Fic- 
tion, in short, is the modern magnet tow- 
ard which all literary product and power 



PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 63 

are drawn. That this predominance is in 
some ways an evil (despite the indisputable 
virtues of the novel), that it is possibly 
fraught with danger to general literary pro- 
duction, is a thesis which will at least bear 
further amplification. 

The injury done to poetry has been 
alluded to. When Walter Scott, after 
triumphing in narrative and ballad verse, 
took up the writing of romances and 
charmed all Europe, he gave English 
fiction an importance and dignity hardly 
enjoyed by it before. Without over- 
looking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 
testimony that Richardson's Pamela wrung 
tears from the chambermaids of all nations, 
it is pretty safe to say that with the Wa- 
verley Novels our fiction, as a distinct 
form, gained a prestige which, in spite of 
fluctuations and what at present some 
incline to call a woful devolution, it has 
never lost. And verse has suffered a pro- 
portionate decay of authority. It has come 
to pass that verse-men adopt a semi-apolo- 
getic tone in putting forth their wares, and 
the soi-disant scientific spirit of the age 
tends to look askance at such activity. 
To be sure, this indifference to poetry 



64 LITERARY LIKINGS 

may easily be exaggerated. If the critic 
go back to any earlier period of English 
poetry, much the same influences may 
be detected : the poets themselves timid 
and knee-supple ; their carping judges 
aghast at the dearth of good work, and 
with their mouths full of praise of some 
previous day. Walter Scott's accent in 
speaking of The Lady of the Lake, be- 
fore its publication, has, for us, a curi- 
ously tentative and deprecatory sound. 
And to read to-day such a critique as 
Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry, wherein 
not Scott alone, but Lord Byron, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Southey are dis- 
missed with contemptuous paragraphs, is 
sufficiently amusing, while suggestive of 
the irresistible tendency to belittle the fore- 
ground in favor of the historical perspective 

— a strange reversal of the ordinary laws 
of composition. But aside from all this, it 
is true enough that contemporaneous poetry 
is, speaking broadly, tolerated rather than 
appraised ; if the text of sales be applied, 
the comparatively small editions of verse 

— the regular edition being 500 volumes, 
and limited editions of less size being a 
fad of the time — show the same thing, 






PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 65 

from the publisher's sober point of view. 
Look, too, at the relative value set on 
fiction and verse in the magazines, those 
faithful registers of popular taste. The 
story is the sine quci non, the one literary- 
form which must be supplied ; the qua- 
train or sonnet is tucked in to fill un- 
seemly gaps between articles. Its func- 
tion is that of a tail-piece. In the days 
of good Queen Bess, poetry in play form 
was the acceptable mode of literary ex- 
pression : there was then a happy con- 
junction of public demand and artistic 
supply, though whether they stood in the 
relation of cause and effect is matter for 
parley. But so much may be roundly 
affirmed : what the play was to that time, 
the novel is to this. Those now writing 
verse must expect and be content with 
smaller sales, slower reputation, and, in 
a sense, an uncongenial environment. 
As a result, the fictional maelstrom sucks 
in some who in another day would have 
been poets, or who, having the name of 
poets, would have done greater work in 
verse than will ever come from them un- 
der existing conditions. It is a curious 
query, What might Kipling have achieved 



66 LITERARY LIKINGS 

in poetry in an age which made the poetic 
drama the recognized mode of expression ? 
This, with two or three of his fine ballads 
in mind, to say nothing of the dramatic 
instinct in his fiction, is not so superficial 
a suggestion as might at first appear. 
But born into these latter-day conditions, 
he is an Uhlan of story-telling, who only 
now and then makes a side-charge into 
the placid domains of Poesy. 1 

Fiction, again, draws the natural essayist 
away from his metier. Those heretical 
enough to prefer the essay-work of Henry 
James to his novels will think of him in 
this connection ; a humorist like Mark 
Twain, undoubtedly a teller of tales, but 
hardly a novelist in the full modern con- 
tent of the word, is another exemplar. 
The cult of the analytic in fiction has led 
many writers, whose forte lay in such 
effects rather than in synthetic creation, 
into novel-making ; and, conversely, per- 
haps the analytic tendency has been thus 
exaggerated, until it has culminated in 
The Story-That-Never-Ends. Interest- 
ing questions and cross-questions arise 

1 This was written, of course, before Kipling's full fame 
as a poet had come. 



PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 67 

here. But the main contention, that this 
modern maelstrom, with its secret under- 
tow, has drawn the essayists into its potent 
circle, to the impoverishment of the essay 
— delightsome form made luminous by 
the names of Montaigne, Lamb, Heine, 
and Arnold — and, as well, to the dubious 
improvement of Fiction itself, is for. easy 
apprehension. Recently, and in large 
part due to the brilliant critical papers of 
such English and American writers as 
Pater, Stevenson, Moore, Lang, and Rep- 
plier, a reaction in favor of the essay is ob- 
servable, and it may be that this will grow 
into a veritable renaissance. So far, how- 
ever, it is little more than a beginning. 
That the reading of the older and standard 
essayists has been checked by the novel 
and its half-breed ally, the newspaper, can- 
not be gainsaid. 

But regarding Fiction alone, what are 
the effects of this autocracy which it main- 
tains in the world of literature ? To our 
thinking, we get bad novels, and too many 
of them, because of it. The form has so 
supreme a power, and the emoluments are 
so glittering, that those who have it in 
them to do good work lash themselves to 



68 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



unnatural exertions in order to answer the 
demand, and sell their second best in lieu 
of their best, which takes more time. 
Very few of our modern novel-writers 
exhibit the conscientious care and lei- 
surely method of Mrs. Ward or Stevenson. 
The temptation is great and the danger 
extreme. And far worse than this, a horde 
of hangers-on rush into the field, and by 
their antics, utterly lacking coherence, 
with no raison d'etre to justify their pres- 
ence, bring what is a gift, an art, and a 
consecrated labor, into misunderstanding 
and disrepute. It is fast coming to the 
point where a man who has not written a 
novel gains thereby a certain distinction ; 
and this surely is ominous for the highest 
interests of Fiction. But it is questiona- 
ble if the novel will remain indefinitely the 
dominant type, the maelstrom engulfing 
the various kinds of literary power and 
activity. All analogy points the other 
way, begetting a presumption in favor of 
some new form or the revival of an old. 
It is not impossible that with a new im- 
pulse in poetry of the narrative or dra- 
matic order, Fiction will find its elder sister 
occupying her sometime place as a coequal. 



PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 69 

Indeed, the forecast for the drama, uniting 
as it does the most splendid creative liter- 
ary energy with action of the most direct 
and universally appealing kind, is espe- 
cially bright. And the literary movement 
in this direction of late suggests an ultimate 
shifting in the relative importance of those 
forms of literary expression which in our 
day engage the interest and affection of 
men. 



7 o LITERARY LIKINGS 



II 

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE 
ROMANCE 

The now palpable reaction from the 
realistic, so called, in English fiction to 
the romantic, as a form and a method, 
suggests an historical retrospect. The 
fact is, the romance, in its several kinds, 
has persisted for centuries in our native 
novel, and its resurgence to-day is only a 
demonstration to be prophesied from past 
experiences in fictional evolution. Nor is 
the explanation far to seek. All the 
world loves a story, as it does a lover; 
and psychologic, interest, the analysis of 
motive and character, will never take the 
place of that objective interest which cen- 
tres in action, situation, and denouement. 
Our age takes more kindly to such methods 
and motives than did its predecessors ; in- 
deed, it has been taught to do so, and the 
novel of subjective tendency may be styled 
the chosen vehicle of expression. But 
always those who read as they run, and 



PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE 71 

the more critical class which seeks in books 
illusion from the workaday world, will 
desire the adventure story and the heroic 
presentment of human life. A host of 
people agree with Balzac that the writer 
of fiction should strive to portray society 
not solely as it is, but as it is hoped it will 
be in that " possibly better " state suggested 
by present improvement. One is struck 
by this in the simple inductive process of 
inquiry among intelligent book-lovers ; 
the present writer has found that a large 
proportion go to novels for rest and recrea- 
tion, rather than for a criticism of life or 
aesthetic stimulation, least of all for spirit- 
ual profit. If this last is to result, let it 
be unobtrusive, by way of indirection, not 
through the avowed tendenz fiction, seems 
to be the cry. 

Text-books are fond of emphasizing 
the birth of the modern analytic novel 
with Richardson and Fielding, as if there- 
after the whole trend were toward the 
subjective social study. It is true enough 
that a new impulse and manner were in- 
troduced by those worthies ; but twenty 
odd years before Pamela, and "Tom Jones, 
De Foe's Robinson Crusoe was in the 



72 LITERARY LIKINGS 






field to represent that undying creature, 
the Romance ; and if Mr. Kipling and 
Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Hall Caine, Dr. 
Doyle, and General Wallace hark back 
to the seamy Daniel as prototype, he in 
turn derives from, the picaresque tales 
that had gone before, and, to look to 
origins, is justified by the Spanish fiction- 
ists from whom our romance sprang. An 
early English example of the picaresque 
is Nash's Jack Wilton^ which, clumsy as 
it is, and naively childish to modern taste, 
does nevertheless explain De Foe on the 
one hand and the penny-dreadful on the 
other. Jack, a page in the English army 
in France at the siege of Tournay, and a 
fellow of infinite gusto, much travel, and 
many escapades, is perhaps the first pict- 
uresque rascal in a genre to be afterwards 
enriched by Dumas and broadened and 
modified by Le Sage, Hugo, Scott, and 
Dickens. He is the father of harum- 
scarums, and he initiates for all time the 
type of the picaresque story — that divi- 
sion of the romance the essence of which 
lies in brisk, breathless adventuring and a 
lusty enjoyment of life as incident and 
spectacle. Such later divisions, of course, 



PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE 73 

as the pastoral romance — early exampled 
in Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia, 
and finding its modern representation in 
Mr. Black, Mr. Blackmore, and others 
— and the bombastic pseudo-romance 
borrowed from the French of Scarron 
et Cie.y and — thank Heaven ! — pretty 
much dead to-day, swell with contribu- 
tory streams the now stately river of 
romance. But the adventure-tale that 
eventuates in Kidnapped and The Refugees 
is to be tracked down to Jack Wilton> 
artless product of Elizabethan times. 

Nor, if we overlook the mere matter of 
prose-form, may we hesitate to go farther 
back in looking for the genesis of the spirit 
and purpose of the English romance. We 
shall meet with it several centuries earlier, 
in that sterling, sturdy literary form, the 
ballad ; in certain of the verse narratives of 
Chaucer; yes, in the Old English epics 
themselves. Other times, other customs, 
and saga, epic, apologue, ballad, or novel 
may be the chosen vehicle ; but the liking 
for story is a constant factor. The instinct 
for romance is the instinct for illusion, a 
request for pictures of a livelier and love- 
lier world than that we live in : it were fool- 



74 LITERARY LIKINGS 

ish not to expect its gratification in art all 
along in the development of our literature. 
With this continual outcropping, this cyclic 
persistence, of the romance in English fic- 
tion, notable contributions in this kind 
may be anticipated in the near future, as a 
rebound from the deification of the psycho- 
analytic. The public is eager for it (apply 
the test of sales in the case of recent prom- 
inent romantic novels) ; and the writers 
of fiction take heart for the attempt, or 
by a natural resilience are of the tribe of 
Dan. But whether the movement pro- 
duce marvels of romantic composition this 
decade or the next century, it is safe to 
say that the field will always be cultivated, 
appealing as it does to a permanent taste 
and satisfying an inevitable hunger. By 
no means is it to be said that the school of 
Messrs. Howells and James is in its de- 
cadence ; fruitful and important work . is 
sure to come thence, and its possibilities, 
especially in the domain of psychology, 
are as yet but half realized. But it is well 
to bear down on the fact that the pedigree 
of this school is no better than, is indeed 
not so old and honorable as, that which 
has De Foe as past master in the last 



PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE 75 

century, and is vigorously championed in 
Jin de siecle English letters by Messrs. 
Kipling and Stevenson. 

And it should be understood that this 
reaction toward incident in fiction is a 
phase of the wider protest against the abuse 
of that misnamed realism for which partial- 
ism is a fitter term. It is part of a ten- 
dency which has produced in Paris, the 
stronghold of the opposite influence, a 
revival denominated neo-idealism, result- 
ing in symbolism in poetry and M. 
Wagner's noble trumpet-call to the young 
generation. Romanticism is to idealism in 
the novel what the garment is to the soul. 
In this broader implication, the romance 
includes Mrs. Ward's David Grieve and 
Mrs. Hunt's Ramona, books treating life 
in its more ideal aims and relations. The 
romance of the future will present such 
high interests, keeping pace with the evo- 
lution of society; and its vantage-ground 
over the romance of years agone will be 
that it is firm-based on truth to the phenom- 
ena of life, and is thus, in the only true 
sense, realistic. Nobler in content and 
persistent in type, the romance, broadly 



76 LITERARY LIKINGS 

viewed, may be regarded as that form of 
literature which more than any other shall 
reflect the aspirations of the individual and 
the social progress of the State. 



NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 77 



III 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 



Just as the term father implies the 
correlative term child > so does a novel 
imply a novel-reader. It were hard to 
imagine a piece of fiction without an audi- 
ence, even if the audience number but one 
and be furnished by the author himself. 
Readers, then, being necessary, it touches 
the quick of the fictionist's interest to in- 
quire : What is the attitude of the present- 
day patrons of tales towards the different 
kinds of fiction purveyed for their delecta- 
tion? Is the purpose-novel preferred, or 
the light and cynical analytic study, or the 
frankly objective adventure- tale of your 
true romanticist? Would Mrs. Ward win 
the popular plebiscite, or Mr. Benson, or 
Messrs. Stevenson, Doyle, and Weyman? 

Of course a categorical reply could only 
be made on the basis of counting noses : 
the pure mathematics of the problem will 
always be out of reach. Still, what with 
the test of sales, the talk of society, and 



7 8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

the a posteriori analyses of the critics, an 
opinion of some solidity may be attained. 
The writer has made a point of conversing 
with all sorts of folk who care for fic- 
tion (and who, outside of the absolutely 
illiterate class, does not care for it?), and 
has been both interested and instructed by 
the testimony thus derived. Blending the 
illumination gained in this way with that 
from other sources, he has concluded that 
novel-readers may be divided, roughly, into 
three classes : first, those who care for fic- 
tion as art primarily, and get their main 
pleasure from its truth to life, its character 
analysis, and its construction ; second, 
those whose interest centres in the thesis 
of the book, and who care little or nothing 
for form, style, and other distinctively lit- 
erary features ; and third, those to whom 
a novel is above all else a story — some- 
thing to amuse and charm, an organism 
with movement and zest of life. 

That division of novel-readers which 
looks for and relishes to the full the art of 
a bit of fiction is comparatively small, and 
for obvious reasons. Here belong the 
critics, the connoisseurs of literature. To 
such it matters not so much if a story be 



NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 79 

pleasant, or whether or not it teaches 
sound morality and superinduces a better 
opinion of one's fellow-men. If it have 
construction, vital character-drawing, and 
verisimilitude, if it possesses stylistic dis- 
tinction and dramatic power, they are satis- 
fied. The analytic student of the novel 
comes in the course of time to put his 
attention on these things to the exclusion 
of everything extraneous ; he reads more 
as a scientist and less as a human being. 
This is at once the privilege and the 
penalty of the critical function. It is only 
the very great books that can wrest him 
from this self-conscious and dubious coign 
of vantage and set him cheek by jowl with 
ordinary humanity, breathless in watching 
a piece of life and personally involved in the 
fortunes of the dramatis persona — in the 
grip of the sweetest and strongest of obses- 
sions. Such, as a rule, is the critic's place 
and state of mind. Not always, even in his 
case, however. Mr. Andrew Lang, suf- 
fering, one might almost say, from a sur- 
feit of culture, likes nothing so well as the 
novel with " go " and color and life, contra- 
distinguished from that of analysis and the 
mooting of problems. Conceiving the end 



80 LITERARY LIKINGS 

of art to be "pleasure, not edification," he 
makes a plea for " the Fijian canons of 
fiction," meaning thereby that those naive 
natives in their stories " tell of gods and 
giants and canoes greater than mountains, 
and of women fairer than the women of 
these days, and of doings so strange that 
the jaws of the listeners fall apart." Mr. 
Lang, in short, is fond of beautiful impos- 
sibilities in a novel. But it is none the 
less fair to say that the critic-class, as such, 
reads with " Art for art's sake " perpetually 
engraven upon its censorious front. And 
it is also plain that the audience thus fur- 
nished the fictionist is so small as to be 
numerically contemptible, and in the 
vulgar matter of sales as unimportant as 
the p in pneumonia. To these profes- 
sionals of criticism may be added a fraction 
of the reading public which uses their 
method, or in amateurish fashion, albeit 
honestly, follows in their wake. Very 
young persons whose education has been 
large and experience limited, and who for 
these reasons take themselves au grand 
serieux, and are more or less self-conscious 
in their psychological habitudes, belong 
here ; here belong, too, older, hardier, and 



NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 81 

more sensible people of a natural intellect- 
ual keenness, the ab ovo analysts of life, 
and of literature as its expression. These 
swear by Mr. Ho wells' dicta, and, as to 
quality, are of the aristoi among readers, 
coveted by all genuine artists. But neither 
of these subsidiary classes swells the critic- 
class, caring for the art of a novel first of 
all, to proportions invalidating our claim 
that it is decidedly the smallest of the 
three, and, so far as immediate influence 
and the substantial return of figures is con- 
cerned, the least important. 

The second and larger class embraces 
readers who object not to didactics in their 
novels. To them a polemic in the guise 
of literature is as acceptable as a pill, sugar- 
coated to the taste, to the thorough-going 
homceopathist. Many falling into this 
category enjoy literature per se, to be sure ; 
but they like it also to convey some 
thoughtful thesis, preferring, so to say, the 
luxuriously cushioned barouche of fiction 
to wrestling with the same problem in the 
Irish jaunting-car of sociology or science. 
Hence is derived a good part of the au- 
dience rallying to the Heavenly Twins 
and A Yellow Aster; or that which a 



82 LITERARY LIKINGS 

few years ago took up arms for Robert 
Elsmere. A part, not the whole, we must 
repeat ; because these tendenzgescbichten, 
as the Germans call them, are far more 
than mere preachments and special plead- 
ings ; often containing the vivid character- 
ization of flesh-and-blood creatures, the - 
one red drop of human life which is pre- 
cious. But it is undeniable that the im- 
mense amount of talk evoked by such 
books had never been forthcoming, were 
they not a stage upon which to display the 
puppets of theory and argument. Right 
here opinions violently clash, and schools 
form as naturally as rocks crystallize. 
Plenty of earnest and honest devotees of 
the novel will have it that art and story 
interest may be supplied in a book, plus 
the presentation of some vital question of 
the day, adding by so much to its impor- 
tance and attraction, and lifting fiction, tra- 
ditionally regarded as a " light " division 
of literature, into a more legitimate place, 
until it ranks with serious (too often a 
synonym for dull) literature. It is, in 
fact, a literary cult, at the present writing, 
to be " serious " in the novel ; as it was a 
social cult, during the recent panic, to be 



NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 83 

poor. It was the book more painfully 
and self-consciously didactic than any 
other in English fiction within several 
years which provoked the most discussion 
— not critical controversy so much as the 
more powerful, unpredicable popular inter- 
est of society. The vogue and stimula- 
tion of Madame Grand's strong if unequal 
and inartistic essay in the field of social 
analysis were little short of phenomenal, 
although now, striking work in other sorts 
of fiction having since obscured it, one 
thinks of this study of the marital relation 
with Villon's refrain rising to the mind : 
" Where are the Snows of Yester-year ? " 
For a season it is even' likely that the 
believers in purpose-fiction outnumbered 
not only the critical minority already char- 
acterized, but also the old-fashioned fol- 
lowers of the healthier tale whom we are 
to reckon with under our third division. 
For a season cnly, however, we should 
guess ; there is a sort of rabies of interest 
which destroys by its own violence, and 
already may be seen the after-effects 
of what has been cleverly dubbed the 
" woman revolt in fiction." Still, this in- 
terest, this excitement, if temporary, has its 



84 LITERARY LIKINGS 

significance, and goes to show that a wider 
and deeper appeal to humankind can be 
made through the novel, and will be made, 
— an appeal touching grave questions and 
the most sacred relations, — as perhaps 
through no other form of the written word. 
It will not do to sneer at tendency in liter-, 
ature as lying outside of critical attention. 
Terence's line applies to literature even as 
to life, and nothing in fiction that broadly 
stirs his fellow men and women can be 
alien to the true critic's function. 

Yet it is plain, and to be plainly stated, 
that this popular furore over a dominant 
piece of purpose-fiction tends to obscure 
critical tests and canons. Those who read 
uncritically incline, under such influence, 
to judge a work by the amount of im- 
mediate noise and intelligent comment it 
begets, and as a consequence one hears 
absurdly exaggerated encomium. The 
Heavenly Twins, for example, is put on 
a par with Marcella; the truth being that 
beside Mrs. Ward's finished and mas- 
terful work of art, it is ill-constructed, 
false to life, faulty in drawing, and terribly 
diffuse — in fine, the journey-work of a 
brilliant novice. The interest awakened 



NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 85 

by such a production is largely adventi- 
tious, because based on an appeal lying 
beyond artistic tests. It is well to have 
this clearly in mind here in the United 
States, where comparative criticism is but 
locally conceded, and where for this reason 
a stern insistence upon the criteria of artis- 
tic perfection is of all places most needed. 
It is not cause for complaint that a host 
of readers, the palpable majority of whom 
are women, welcome novels handling with 
more or less elan the relations of the sexes ; 
the repression, by the Anglo-Saxon tradi- 
tions of convenance in fiction, of all that 
side of social phenomena, results, as might 
be expected, in an excess of curiosity and 
excitement which have their morbid mani- 
festations ; but the residuum of all this fer- 
ment will be a broader outlook and a freer 
conception of motifs. If, however, we do 
not learn to apply rigidly and with malice 
prepense to any fiction whatsoever, man- 
made or woman-begotten, the universal 
rules of art, a parlous state is ours. That 
section of society which elects the purpose- 
novel as its special pet and pride may 
gratify its taste under promise to exempt 
none of this popular product from the 



86 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Rhadamanthian judgment by the which all 
fiction must be judged; and with the agree- 
ment to keep clearly dissevered in their 
own minds the appeal of art and the appeal 
of thought. 

The readers of a more genial habit and 
a more traditional standard make up our 
third and final class. They care for a story 
for the story's sake, and, bothering not 
overmuch if its likeness to life be dubious, 
go so far as to open arms to a fine rep- 
resentation of the improbable. They stand 
by Balzac's phrase (rarely obeyed by the 
master himself) that the novelist should 
depict the world, not as it is, but as it 
may possibly become. And it is this sort 
of folk, we would contend, which on 
the whole is the best-balanced, the most 
humanistic, and, in the long run, the most 
influential among novel-readers. Mr. 
Howells inclines to contemn a species 
which, to his view, still loves the rattle and 
the woolly horse in literature. But if he, 
or any other seeker after truth, will pursue 
the Socratic method, conversing with 
fellow-mortals in the chance jostle of the 
social plexus, he will get evidence pushing 
towards our conclusion. The fact is that, 



NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 87 

despite all our rather self-conscious prating 
about art, and notwithstanding our some- 
what feverish enthusiasm over introspec- 
tive social questions, the clear-headed and 
sound-hearted folk, who — thank Heaven ! 
— are the warp of our social fabric, do not 
care to fret and fume for any such thing. 
They go to the novel for rest, amusement, 
illusion, as did the lovers of Thackeray 
and Dickens, of Scott and Dumas ; as 
thousands again did in the case of Trilby, 
as true a child of the elder romanticists as 
was ever born. They have a deep-seated 
prejudice against fiction with a bad ending ; 
so far from wishing to have a great book 
stamped indelibly on the mind at a first 
contact, they are glad to possess, as a cul- 
tivated reader expressed it to the writer, 
" the pleasant habit of forgetting a novel," 
assuring additional delight in the event of 
re-perusal. " The world is two-thirds bad, 
I know," says the Advocatus diaboli to the 
stickler for high art and serious purpose. 
" Your c realism ' teaches me nothing, it 
simply repeats unsavory and belittling 
facts of life ; and I would have none of 
it. Give me lies rather than literalities, 
or, better yet, the half-truths of a scene 



88 LITERARY LIKINGS 

where the light is accented and the 
shadows put in corners — where they be- 
long." Now, this is unphilosophic per- 
haps, but it is natural and {pace Mr. 
Howells and those who jump with him) 
it is healthy, very. The trouble with the 
Howellsian view of fiction is that it is pro- 
fessional, and so not generally applicable. 
He is perfectly right — for himself. 

But to argue pro and con as to this 
attitude of the readers who clamor for 
pleasant and incident-thronged novels, and 
who are the operative cause of the Roman- 
tic reaction we are now witnessing, is, 
after all, aside from our main line of 
argument. We are not justifying their 
position or attacking it : we would sim- 
ply register the fact of their existence, 
and express the conviction that, while 
equal in intelligence and possibly excel- 
ling in common-sense either of the two 
other classes, they are to-day, and will 
be more surely to-morrow, the strongest 
in numbers, and thus for practical rea- 
sons are to be respectfully regarded by 
the maker of tales. Mr. Crawford, in 
his chapters on the Art of Fiction^ in- 
sists that it is the novelist's primary 






NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 89 

business to purvey amusement. The 
believers in romances have a sneaking 
sympathy with this position, though 
many of them would claim, and rightly, 
that along with the pleasure may go a 
noble stimulation of ideals affording that 
instruction, through the divine indirection 
of art, which is as far removed from di- 
dacticism as from the irresponsibility of 
the thorough-going realist. The advan- 
tage of those whose cry is all for illusion 
lies in their being in the line of a whole- 
some tradition, since men and women 
have gone more steadily to fiction for 
just that than for aught else; and, again, 
in their now perceptible and daily wax- 
ing in strength, a phenomenon due to 
the noticeable reaction, on the one side 
from the strained probing of psychologic 
problems, on the other from the art which 
substitutes form for substance and a qui- 
escent pessimism for the cheerful bustle 
and vigor of red-blooded humankind. 
It is an audience to depend on in any 
age, this of the romance readers, and in 
quality such that the writer of fiction may 
well trust himself to deserve its plaudits ; 
it is a constituency which he should hes- 






9 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

itate to lose, even if there appear to be a 
temporary appetite for the morbid or the 
naturalistic. It is a backing which, year 
in and year out, will sell his books and 
establish his fame and make his copyright 
a valuable inheritance to his children. 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 91 



IV 

PERMANENT TYPES IN MOD- 
ERN FICTION 

. ■ * 

The distinction of the modern novel 
— the novel of analysis deriving from 
Richardson and Fielding — is its emphasis 
of individual character. The fiction of in- 
cident and plot is much older, and is still 
lusty, showing, in fact, within the past few 
years, an efflorescence in adventure stories, 
the names of Stevenson, Kipling, Weyman, 
Doyle, Crockett, and Hope coming to 
mind. But since Richardson's Pamela 
the development of the novel of character 
has been rapid and rich in results, standing 
for the main tendency ; even the so-called 
novel of incident — exemplified by some 
notable works of Stevenson — has had to 
pay some attention to analysis. The 
modern man is more subjective, and his 
fiction reflects the fact. In a great story 
that precedes by only a few years the 
analytic stories of Richardson and Field- 
ing, as we have noted, the method is very 



92 LITERARY LIKINGS 

different. Robinson Crusoe is the advent- 
ure tale pure and simple ; we are interested 
in the main character, not so much for him- 
self as because of his unique position. 

To think of permanent types of fiction, 
therefore, — with modern English litera- 
ture mostly in view, — is, broadly speak- 
ing, to consider character ; those men 
and women in stories whom we accept as 
alive, as real creations, and as typifying 
humanity. 

One would say, h priori, that the 
creatures of fiction generally received as 
veritable examples of human nature 
must possess elemental qualities, and be 
recognized as flesh and blood like unto 
ourselves. I think that, as a generaliza- 
tion, this is true. Yet some famous crea- 
tions are against the theory ; Dickens* 
characters, for example. His folk confess- 
edly are often not so much individuals as 
abstracts of some dominant trait or humor ; 
they are not seldom caricature rather than 
portraiture. Yet what novelist's people 
are better known, have a more permanent 
place in affectionate memory ? 

This remark about Dickens puts us on 
the truth. We may be pretty sure of two 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 93 

things about these permanent types — 
they are in some way attractive, and they 
are keenly realized by their begetter. Be- 
ing actual to him, they are actual to us. 
And this is only another way of saying 
that they do, after all, set forth faithfully 
the traits — the foibles, errors, aspirations, 
sins, nobilities, ambitions, and sacrifices 
— of human beings. They typify some- 
thing, they represent life. This is pre- 
eminently true of Dickens, with all his 
exaggeration. This typification may be 
of several kinds. First, the character 
may stand for a class. Thackeray's Pen- 
dennis is a type of the young English 
gentleman in his salad days ; Dickens' 
Micawber, of the impecunious optimist ; 
Howells' Silas Lapham, of the self-made 
American. Again, national as well as 
class characteristics may be displayed. 
This is true of Lapham, whom we recog- 
nize as indigenous. Tolstoy's Oblonsky, 
in Anna Karenina, is a typical Russian 
of the pleasure-loving, princely class ; 
the hero of Turgenef 's Fathers and Sons 
is Slav as well as Nihilist, while Newman, 
in Henry James' The American (perhaps 
his best novel) has the ear-marks of a 



94 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Westerner of the States, his salient fea- 
tures in high relief against the European 
background. Or, once more, besides in- 
dicating class and nation in this way, 
they may also represent those deep abid- 
ing qualities of our common human na- 
ture that are elemental — that, allowing 
for all differences of time and country 
and culture, are permanent, found alike 
in Homer, in the Greek and the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists, in Cervantes, or in the 
modern social story. More than one of 
the protagonists just mentioned partake 
of this fundamental aspect. When a fic- 
tion writer creates in this way, broadly, 
humanly, with an unerring insight into the 
springs of action, local, national, general, 
he is great in his calling. I am inclined 
to think that, of all the story-makers in 
this century, Balzac comes nearest to do- 
ing this thing, The range, variety, depth, 
fineness, and strength of his performance 
are amazing. He saw the human comedy 
as a whole, and was acute enough to de- 
pict it by crowding his mighty canvas with 
French types, the types he knew best, 
which become, nevertheless, representative 
figures, aside from all racial limits. Were 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 95 

not my special quarry American and 
English fiction, it were well .to illustrate 
and expand as to Balzac. 

A thoughtful English critic, himself a 
novelist, has said, in a recent article, that 
while the Gallic and Slavic fictionists deal 
with the primary human passions, — love, 
hate, revenge, ambition, and the like, — 
the Anglo Saxons delineate secondary and 
minor traits. This is a sweeping state- 
ment, not, I fancy, to be substantiated by 
a wide induction. But this much surely 
may be asserted — the handling of motif 
has been freer outside of English fiction, 
and, on the whole, the English books 
dealing with elemental humanity have 
been fewer. Also, the books that are 
great, in which the personages take the 
firmest hold of us, are those which por- 
tray these strongest, deepest interests and 
passions. This is the trouble with a good 
deal of the late work of James: he has 
come to consider delicate psychologic nice- 
ties more than primal instincts and desires. 
The carbonic acid gas of drawing-rooms, 
not the oxygen of the open, is breathed 
in his attenuated tales — with some noble 
exceptions. And it may well be that the 



96 LITERARY LIKINGS 

wholesome moral restrictions that until 
recently have bound, and in comparison 
with the extreme French and Italian work 
still do bind, our English-written fiction 
have made its men and women less broadly 
human in the sense that they have not 
been exhibited on all sides so consistently 
as in the best foreign work. Ethically 
viewed, however, the gain to fiction is 
greater than the loss. This leads to the 
interesting query, Has the realistic 
school, which has now for some years had 
its say, added permanent figures to the 
historic canons of fictional creations? If 
it has, its method is in some sense justified. 
Were the characters in so-called realistic 
novels affectionately conceived by their 
makers, their chances for permanency 
would be good. There is no lack of talent, 
even of genius, in writers of this school. 
I should not be inclined to deny the latter 
highest quality to Thomas Hardy, to 
name one leader; yet he has not been 
prolific of these types, if, indeed, he has 
created any. The realistic writers as a 
class have not given us broad, living crea- 
tions. The failure of realism to portray 
permanent types cannot be set aside by the 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 97 

easy explanation that they deal for the 
most part with the seamy aspects of life. 
There are lovable rascals in fiction. No, 
the fault lies with the point of view, the 
method. The realist tries to see his 
characters objectively ; he detaches him- 
self from them ; in a word, dissects them 
coldly. He sees them lop-sided, too 
much in the flesh. The realist does not 
love his creations. Love will cover a mul- 
titude of sins in the story-writer. When 
the romanticist of fiction, with a big heart 
and a catholic comprehension of human 
kind, shows you a bad man or woman in 
a sympathetic way, with the implication 
that there is some good along with the 
evil, and always the chance of better 
things, you are broadened and made seri- 
ous-minded, but not depressed or devital- 
ized. Hawthorne's Hester is a sinner, 
not a decadent. Stevenson's picturesque 
rascals are of this wholesome sort. Gil- 
bert Parker's Pierre, in those wonderful 
tales of the far North, is of the same 
family. He is not a saint, Master Pierre, 
but a fellow one likes withal, and is helped, 
not harmed, by knowing. With very few 
exceptions, the strongest characters of 



98 LITERARY LIKINGS 

realists are not sympathetic ; the author 
has not yearned over them fondly, and 
consequently the reader is not magnetized. 

This reason why the realist fails in giv- 
ing us permanent types — because, while 
they may be realized as actual, they are 
not truly loved — leads back to a re- 
newed insistence on those two criteria : 
characters, to live and appeal broadly, 
must not only be vividly conceived by 
their creator, but must be winsome, must 
attract rather than repel. Dickens, on 
finishing a story, was saddened that he 
had to bid his imagined folk good-by. 
In one preface he tells how he hated to 
leave his dramatis person*, being moved 
even to tears. Goethe used to set his 
literary characters in a chair opposite him, 
and talk to them literally. These inci- 
dents illustrate what I mean by vivid, 
loving conception in literature. 

It is a fact which those who sneer at 
the ethical in literary art must explain, 
that the permanent fictional types are 
prevailingly those which depict the nobler 
and sweeter and more normal aspects of 
humanity. Moreover, I believe there is 
a deep psychologic reason for this, and 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 99 

will speak of it anon. By no means will 
it do to claim that invariably these types 
are thus beautiful. Becky Sharp is as 
permanent as Colonel Newcome. If 
the drawing be sympathetic and masterly, 
and the traits recognizable, it is enough. 
But that the world of readers prefers 
those creations which exemplify the bet- 
ter, higher, purer, and sweeter side of 
humanity seems to me as indubitable as 
it is certain that the making of such calls 
out the best powers of the writer. This 
is an instinct of self-preservation in man- 
kind : to wish the best they can show to 
live. Most of us would rather see noble 
folk than ignoble around us in real life : 
it is the same in fiction. 

By a sort of reflex action, the very ex- 
istence of such heroes and heroines im- 
plies potential heroics in ourselves, is a 
compliment and tonic to our human 
nature. And so it is that the permanent 
types of fiction are made up largely of 
those who in some way deserve the heroic 
designation. They are heroes and hero- 
ines, not in the conventional modern sense 
of the realist, whose nominal hero is an 
epitome of the vices or a walking congeries 



ioo LITERARY LIKINGS 

of commonplaces, but in the good roman- 
tic sense, with the primitive Greek flavor 
to it of large, fine, sweet action. Here 
belong the main men and women of Scott, 
Eliot, Reade, Dickens at his most inspired. 
George Eliot is a stern realist, granted. 
One of her central figures — Tito in 
Romola — is a study of moral weakness 
rather than of strength. But he is a foil 
to Romola herself, and of Eliot's work 
as a whole it may truthfully be said that 
she draws real heroes and heroines — all 
the realer in that they sin and suffer. On 
a little reflection, it will appear that many 
a character of fiction you would not think 
at first of putting in the heroic category 
is preserved to immortality by some touch 
of nobility, a heroic strain, warped, hidden, 
blurred, maybe, but there nevertheless. 
Humanity will not readily give up the 
heroic, and is lynx-eyed to detect its gleam, 
even of the jewel in the dung-hill. 

But in the hero-worship by novel- 
readers, the false-heroic is excluded ; it 
is men, not demi-gods, that are admired. 
That which violates truth to real human- 
ity is to-day foredoomed to fail. Such 
types cannot be realized by their maker, 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 101 

and are unnatural to us. As notable a 
failure in this class as English fiction can 
show is Sir Charles Grandisoh in Richard- 
son^ novel of that name. Grandison, in- 
tended for a hero, is an insufferable prig, 
not to be credited for a moment, and al- 
ways a bore. The tendency of the mod- 
ern novel has been to draw credible heroes 
and heroines, or, at least, flawed characters 
with noble elements in them. Many of 
George Meredith's men and women fur- 
nish good illustration. Roy Richmond 
in Harry Richmond, Richard Feverel in 
the book of that name, Diana in Diana 
of the Crossways, — none of them saints, 
the first a scapegrace, the second almost 
morally wrecked, the woman in a strange 
scene selling her lover for money, yet 
all leaving the impression of natures capa- 
ble of high love, courage, or self-sacrifice. 
Kipling, in a virile, careless way, has shown 
us the possibility of heroics in the rough 
British private. Barrie and Maclaren 
paint for an admiring host of readers the 
virtues of Scotch rustics, not blinking the 
faults and vices ; and their types are likely 
to last, for the very reason that they are 
seen in the whole, they are recognized as 



io2 LITERARY LIKINGS 

true, and as well beloved of their makers. 
An American writer like Miss Jewett, 
never abusing a fine realism, draws rural 
New Englanders from an equal reservoir 
of love and knowledge ; and exquisite lit- 
erature, with types not to be forgotten, is 
the outcome. 

Thus, in many sections of our wonder- 
ful land, devoted and skilful writers, who 
are also sympathetic students of Man, are 
portraying types in short story or full- 
length novel in such wise that — although 
it is too early even for prophecy — some 
permanent figures must, it would seem, 
remain. If they do not, it will be because 
the study was too minute and fussy. 
For when those two things, affection and 
genuine acquaintance^ with the subject- 
matter, are conjoined with literary expres- 
sion, permanent types are pretty sure to 
emerge — types the world will accept as 
true to our western civilization. It were 
easy to swell this paper beyond its limits 
with examples of the good work already 
done. The artist must know, must have 
imagination and moral principle, seeing 
the finer issues of our underlying human- 
ity in whatever local conditions, however 



PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 103 

humble his persons or scenes. Then the 
fiction will have the abiding quality. 
This quality one finds in the best work 
of Parker with his Canadians, Garland 
with his Westerners, Howells with his 
urban folk, Page with his darkies, Cable 
with his Creoles, Helen Hunt with her 
Indians, — to run over a few representa- 
tive names. 

To return to the keynote. Permanent 
types in fiction portray with truth and 
power some phase of essential, broad 
human nature, as well as of human nature 
with the dress and accent and manner of a 
given time and place. And these types 
must spring creatively from one who loves 
them much, and sees them as if bodied 
forth in the flesh ; and they will be the 
surer of permanency the more they imply 
the God-in-man. This last will be fool- 
ishness to those who would dissever art 
from ethics. But I believe the appeal to 
literary history proves it beyond perad- 
venture. 



A Study in the Literary Time-spirit 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES: 

A STUDY IN THE LITERARY TIME-SPIRIT. 

i 

l*T is conventional criticism to say that 

*- great writers make the Time-spirit. Now 
and then, perhaps, in the course of the 
centuries, it is true that dominant figures 
stand out ahead of their day and seem to 
shape its thought. Yet even some of the 
world masters — Shakespeare, Dante, Cer- 
vantes — are in many ways creatures of 
their epoch, moulded by its ideals, ex- 
pressing the intellectual and spiritual 
standards of their land and period. 

General propositions are dangerous ; 
but I believe it will be found of the ma- 
jority of leading literary figures of his- 
tory that, rather than lead their day, they 
have expressed it, and, moreover, have 
changed with its change. Possibly it 
would be more philosophic to say that 
the age changes with them and because of 



108 LITERARY LIKINGS 

them ; but analysis reveals the fact that, 
as a rule, expansion of thought and broad- 
ening of knowledge come from a field lying 
outside of literature; namely, from science. 
It is the business of literature to reflect 
this growth. The great creative writers 
take over this knowledge into the imagi- 
native domain, and make use of it in art. 
In this sense they are the children of the 
Time-spirit. This thesis is illustrated by 
the literary work of three men, Bjornson, 
Daudet, and James, all of whom occupy 
commanding positions in the letters of 
their respective lands. It is well to select 
writers of ripe maturity, since otherwise 
their careers would not extend through 
years sufficient to bring them under the 
altered ideals I have in mind. 

The present literary standard and temper 
are expressed by the convenient, though 
hackneyed, word realism. Whatever its 
origin, however justifiable as a revolt from 
narrow and sentimental untruth in literary 
art, realism has brought in its train the 
cult of the grim, the low, the impure, and 
the horrible. It has also resulted in much 
that is admirable, and it registers an ad- 
vance in technique. But the sins of real- 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 109 

ism are heavy. This literary movement 
is far more than aesthetic. Within its 
wide boundaries are summed aip and ex- 
pressed the unrest, the doubt, and the 
agony of a period which, within a half 
century, has been compelled by the stern 
teaching of science to reconstruct its atti- 
tude towards the eternal, and to behold a 
new heaven and a new earth. Literature 
has had to assimilate these changes, and 
literary workers have expressed it accord- 
ing to individual bias and temperament. 
The shallow it has not so much affected, 
save as furnishing a pretext for the pessi- 
mistic pose. The weak it has crushed or 
driven into rebellion, license, and despair. 
The strongest and deepest have been 
changed and saddened by it. If our old- 
est living writers of highest literary repute 
in the civilized lands were studied for the 
sole purpose of observing how they have 
been spiritual barometers registering the 
ethic weather, the great gulf which lies 
between 1850 and 1890 would be realized. 
A brief scrutiny of Bjornson, Daudet, and 
James will make the point clear. 



no LITERARY LIKINGS 



II 



Bjornson shares with Ibsen the literary 
supremacy of Norway. The former is 
its hero and prophet as the latter is its 
judge. Through a long, strenuous, ath- 
letic life of struggle with forces practical 
and spiritual, Bjornson has shown an 
intellectual development and a shift of 
ethical and artistic creed which are remark- 
able. He has well-nigh boxed the mental 
compass of opinion. This change is as 
obvious in his literary work as in his 
relations to the politics of his native land. 
He began his literary career by writing 
simple, exquisite idyls of country life, 
with little of plot or drama, but having 
great charm of truthful, sympathetic char- 
acterization and picturesque description. 
Read Synnove Solbakken for a classical 
example of this genre. The book is a 
homely, beautiful prose poem in which 
the Norwegian peasant is revealed in his 
habit as he lives, by one who knows and 
loves him. Nor do Arne and The Fisher 
Maiden, which followed, representing his 
first decade of authorship, lie outside of 
this idyllic group. Nor again do his 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES in 

dramatic works up to 1870 indicate the 
change that was coming. Tragedies he 
wrote, of course, as in the great trilogy of 
Sigurd Slembe, or in Maria Stuart. But 
we have strong, healthy romanticism here, 
as we have in Ibsen's splendid earlier 
history-play, The Pretenders, between 
which and the dreary sadness of his later 
social dramas there is a world of differ- 
ence. 

It is only after 1870 that the present 
Bjornson begins to emerge, that the 
insistent fatalistic note is heard, bespeak- 
ing the soul of one for whom the times 
are out of joint. In both plays and 
stories the gloom deepens rapidly, the 
stress grows grimmer and grimmer. Dur- 
ing the years from 1872 to 1874 Bjorn- 
son, hitherto satisfied with Norway's 
people and her political status, expressing 
in literary forms this national eupepsia, — 
satisfied, too, with the world and its 
maker, — was undergoing more than a sea 
change. His writings began to voice this 
change of heart* He became the advo- 
cate of extreme republicanism in politics 
and free thought in religion. From this 
inspiration have come, during the last 



ii2 LITERARY LIKINGS 

twenty years, half a dozen or more novels 
and as many plays. A practical result 
has been that Bjornson is mistrusted or 
hated of conservatives, adored by the 
young blood. The common folk, though 
looking askance at his heterodoxy, have 
not displaced him from his niche, won by 
his earlier portrayal of them, and by his 
superb patriotism. In a word, this leader, 
under the stimulus of late nineteenth-cen- 
tury ideas, has turned iconoclast ; the in- 
tellectual goad of our time has made him 
a fighter ; " only combat," says a friend, 
" arouses his Titantic energy and calls all 
his splendid faculties into play." 

The subjects of his realistic and search- 
ing analytical dramas and novels are in 
evidence. Looking forth upon modern 
society, upon a world transfigured for 
him by Darwin and Spencer, he shows 
this trend in his literary product. Turn 
to the plays for a moment. Bankruptcy 
in 1 874 was a study of the dubious morals 
in the money world, suggesting the paral- 
lel of Zola's U Argent. The Editor, of 
the next year, is a savage satire on latter- 
day journalism, with its lies, scandal, sub- 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 113 

terfuges. The King (1877) exhibits roy- 
alty as a curse because of the inevitable 
injury to the ruler's character, and because 
founded on a sham divinity, — this thesis 
significant in a land well-nigh in the 
throes of republican birth. Leonardo, 
(1877) and The Glove (1883) deal boldly 
with aspects of the woman question, the 
former imagining the case of a spotted 
creature and depicting society's attitude 
towards her, while the latter shows a man 
in the same dilemma, society being as soft 
as before it was hard. The girl Leonarda 
is a manifestation of the New Woman, 
the sort of unconventional creature drawn 
by Ibsen, Sudermann, and the English- 
men, Jones and Pinero ; and Svava in 
'The Glove is another girl to be differenti- 
ated distinctly from the type obtaining of 
old. She is as frank as a boy with her 
lover, and insists that he be judged by as 
severe a standard as she herself. Beyond 
his Strength, the same year, shows Bjorn- 
son struggling with the great modern 
question of monopoly. Labor is ranged 
against capital, workmen strike, ask for 
redress by arbitration, and finally lay a 
train by which capitalists in session are 



H 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



blown up by dynamiters. Yet the master 
is not conquered, the trouble remains 
unsolved. The play states dramatically 
the existing conditions, and implies some 
right on both sides. A sombre, strenu- 
ous play it is, displaying distraught nerves 
and hysterical ambitions at war with peace 
and happiness. These six plays suffice to 
give an idea of the motifs used by Bjbrn- 
son since his emancipation. 

A number of novels illustrate the same 
tendency. It will be enough to look at 
two leading fictions : Flags in City and 
Harbor (1884) and In God's Ways (1889). 
The former, which has appeared in English 
translation as the Heritage of the Kurts, 
grapples with the tremendous question of 
heredity — a social factor that with mod- 
ern literature is coming to play a lead- 
ing role, like Fate in the Greek dramatists. 
Zola's whole scheme in his Rougon-Mac- 
quart series is based thereupon. So with 
this great work of Bjornson's. Five gen- 
erations of Kurts are analyzed ; there is 
bad blood in them, a fierce, lustful heri- 
tage from savage forbears. The hero's 
father has married a noble specimen of 
untainted peasant womanhood, and his 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 115 

racial instinct breaks out in a quarrel with 
his wife, whom he physically maltreats. 
But it is Greek meet Greek, for she is 
no white, weak, high-bred dame to be 
cowed by his insolence, but gives blow 
for blow, and before they are through the 
room is full of wrecked furniture as well 
as hopes. The husband, moreover, is 
second-best, and dies of apoplexy. This 
scene, coarse in fact, has such issues at 
stake that its significance is awful, remov- 
ing it to another sphere from such another 
awful scene as that in Tom Jones, where 
Squire Western strikes his daughter to 
the floor. Now mark the sequel. The 
widow looks forward to maternity, and 
keenly aware of the probability that the 
child will have the father's disposition — 
be weighted by the terrible Kurt heritage 
— she thinks of killing herself. The 
strength and horror of this psychological 
situation are manifest. Finally she de- 
cides that if the child is dark, like the 
Kurts, she and it shall die ; if blonde, like 
her people, it shall live and be reared in 
all right ways by its mother, so to purify 
the paternal taint. The boy child proves, 
very disobligingly, neither fish nor flesh : 



n6 LITERARY LIKINGS 

he is red-haired and gray-eyed, both father 
and mother appearing in him. So the 
mother dubiously decides in his favor, 
brings him up on a most scientific scheme 
of education (the treatment here reminds 
of Meredith's Richard Fever el), and lo ! the 
result is that he turns out a prig — too 
good, as his father was too bad. He is a 
disagreeable ascetic, whom we grudgingly 
respect. A gleam of light is thrown in at 
the end, when he marries a wholesome girl 
of sounder stock than his own. Behold 
how impossible to fiction before the sec- 
ond half of the century such a thing is ! 
Though of absorbing interest, the story 
hardly furnishes pleasant reading. The 
other novel, In God's Ways^ is still more 
daring and drastic. The situation handled is 
somewhat like that in The Heavenly 'Twins. 
A wife, discovering she is linked to a liber- 
tine, leaves him and eventually unites her- 
self to a young doctor who has revealed to 
her her wrong. Society, which has ap- 
plauded the act which leads her into the 
shame of living with her husband, is 
shocked when she marries the other ; and 
by a series of delicate deadly slights and 
innuendoes hounds her down to the grave. 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 117 

There is a parson and his wife who, proper 
folks socially as well as ethically, condemn 
the woman, only waking up to her nobility 
when she is dead. The story, as centring 
around the New Woman again, is ad- 
vanced, and is pessimistically sad in tone, 
though there are alleviations in other char- 
acters. That it is very Ibsenish may be 
gathered even from this meagre sketch. 
Some of the chapters are repulsively path- 
ological — Zola has to look to his laurels 
at times. It may be added that in the 
later collection of short stories (1894) en- 
titled New Tales, the uncompromising, 
harsh realism is if anything more marked, 
and the lime-light of the Romanticist is 
never turned on. Contrasting all this 
latest work with the Bjornson of the early 
idyl, poem, and romantic history-play, 
one realizes what a change is here, what a 
moulding under the influence of the 
Time-spirit. 

Ill 

Turn now to a very different maker of 
literature, who yet has been sensitive to 
the same subtle influences. Alphonse 
Daudet, a supreme artist, naturally a 



n8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

poet and romanticist, drifted far from his 
sometime tender and joyous sketches and 
stories into the joyless waters of modern 
realism. He began as a dreamer, a lover 
of Nature, a sun-worshipping Provencal. 
Think of his Letters from my Mill, the 
work of a young man of twenty-six, a 
delightsome thing compounded of delicate 
humor and poetry and stingless satire. 
And in the first of the Tartarin series, 
coming a few years after, what a chef 
d'ceuvre of satiric fun surcharged with the 
spirit of his natal south ! It was not until 
1874, when Daudet was thirty-four, that 
he came to see Life after the manner of 
the modern psychological school. Real- 
ism then got him in its grip. With Fro- 
ment Jeune et Risler Aini comes a right- 
about-face indeed. Here is a Parisian 
novel minute in its descriptions of modern 
types, searching in analysis, unpleasant 
often in scene or character, and pursuing 
relentlessly to the bitter end the inevitable 
results of bad acts. The plot is risky, 
realistic in the extreme. A fine old fellow 
betrayed by his business partner and by 
the wife of his bosom is not an agreeable 
spectacle. Here again is the light woman 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 119 

and the drame a trois which have become 
the stock properties of current French 
fiction ; the three-cornered drama played 
by husband, wife, and lover. 

The next novel, Jack, is as poignantly 
sad a thing as was ever writ. Like Suder- 
mann's Dame Care, it is the autobiography 
of a shy, sensitive lad, but the Gallic 
touch makes it very different. Here we 
get the light woman who is a mother — 
a far more repulsive phenomenon than 
Sidonie in the earlier book. The son, 
driven from home, loses faith in all good, 
and incontinently goes to the bad. With 
all its pathos and power, Jack is a work 
of heart-rending gloom and irony. At 
the core of its intense moral earnestness 
lies the dry-rot of despair. The evil is 
presented for the sake of a comment upon 
Life's mysteries — the pity of its mistakes, 
the awfulness of its misdoings. The 
Nabob, two years later, is by no means so 
unpleasant, yet it could hardly be called 
cheerful reading, ending as it does in the 
social and financial downfall of its hero, 
the wonderfully drawn Provencal money- 
king. But the book contains much of 
stern realism in the analysis of character ; 



120 LITERARY LIKINGS 

and in that other study of the Provence 
type, Numa Roumestan, whose protagonist 
is a brilliantly mendacious creature full of 
tergiversation and tricky finesse, certainly 
the after-taste is not agreeable, though 
few modern fictions can equal it for truth 
and force. The very dramatic and fasci- 
nating story Kings in Exile y with its picture 
of royalty stripped of its pomp and cir- 
cumstance, its poetic handling of the 
romantic devotion which is inspired by 
the king idea, has less of the sombre 
quality we are drawing attention to in 
Daudet's later works. But Sapho (1884) 
shows the author's most extreme venture 
into the Zolaesque, and is hardly to be 
discussed. What a long road its author 
has travelled since the days of the ex- 
quisite short stories and the dreamy idyls 
of his youth ! And what a savage, sweep- 
ing satire of social hypocrisy is The Im- 
mortaly which materially damaged Daudet's 
chance of admission to the French Acad- 
emy ! Whether or not personal rancor 
at his non-election to that august body 
underlay the animus of the book, its tone 
is decidedly cynical, and the final case of 
the Academician, laughed at by his col- 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 121 

leagues, despised at home by his wife 
and son, and finding refuge in suicide, 
is sorry enough. Daudet' s last novel, 
The Support of the Family », which has ap- 
peared in an English rendering since the 
death of the author, is a full-length, 
minute portraiture of a weak, corrupt 
nature ; the romantic touch at the end is 
out of key with the drift of the book. 
But enough stories have been touched 
upon to show that in his major work, his 
full-length fiction, Daudet has moved 
steadily away from pleasing romance and 
poetry, and towards sombre portraiture 
and the destructive criticism of life. I do 
not forget charming idyllic studies like 
Le Petit Chose in 1876, or La Belle Niver- 
naise a decade later, little classics both ; 
this writer has never lost utterly his early 
mood and manner. But the most serious 
and thorough-going work has been in the 
other direction. Allowing for the per- 
sonal equation, it seems a fair statement 
to say that the Time-spirit has been as 
efficacious in shaping the literature and in 
changing the philosophy of Daudet as it 
has been in the person of his Norwegian 
broth er-in-letters, Bjornson. 



122 LITERARY LIKINGS 



IV 



It remains to speak of the third author 
in the trilogy, a man and writer so en- 
tirely diverse from the other two that it 
seems whimsical to bracket them together. 
Yet Henry James also illustrates the 
workings of this same law. The Time- 
spirit has also had its way with him. To 
say that Bjornson, Daudet, and James are 
realists, each after his own manner, is one 
way of illustrating how wide is the con- 
tent, how loose the significance, of the 
word realism. James is no more like 
either of the others than chalk is like 
cheese. An Anglo-Saxon, of excessive 
refinement, the fleshly, as such, has no 
lure for him at all. But intellectually, 
and in the conductment of his tales, he 
has shown himself progressively one 
whose creed is summed up by the weari- 
some catch-phrase, " Art for Art's 
Sake." He applies agnostic analysis to 
the psychological states of human beings 
— psychology, character study, and de- 
velopment constituting his supreme in- 
terest. This taste, together with an 
increasing culture of aestheticism which 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 123 

has run into a sort of man-milliner fussi- 
ness, has led him in his latest phase to 
substitute " nice shades and fine feelings " 
— in George Meredith's phrase — for the 
elemental interests and passions of men 
and women. Read The Spoils of Poynton, 
a recent book, in proof. A subtle indi- 
rection of style and tenuity of thought 
have contributed to an effect which has 
lost him the sympathy of many healthy- 
minded and intelligent folk. Yet with all 
subtractions, with a class narrowness cling- 
ing to all he does, he remains uniquely an 
artist in his peculiar field. But leave the 
James of to-day, for once, and go back 
twenty odd years to Watch and Ward, 
The Passionate Pilgrim^ and Roderick Hud- 
son. The one word by which to charac- 
terize this early work is Romanticism. 
Watch and Ward^ his first fiction of mo- 
ment, has analysis, the psychologic in- 
terest. But its pleasant ending is a con- 
cession to the romantic. A young man 
who adopts a little girl and rears her with 
the hope of making her his wife would 
not succeed always in life ; and certainly 
would not succeed in James* later fiction. 
The book is full of poetic beauty and ideal 



124 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



fitness. It shows us a James able to se- 
lect from the raw material of life the 
happier eventualities of art. The six 
tales included in The Passionate Pil- 
grim are the work of the romanticist. 
Several of them are steeped in a gentle 
melancholy, but all of them are poetic, 
vital with human feeling that explains 
their atmosphere and justifies their de- 
nouement. 

These half dozen stories put one in 
thrall to a James one has to be reintro- 
duced to if one has known him only in 
his recent work. Then consider that 
superb romance, Roderick Hudson, a novel 
which, for largeness, moving power, and 
sense of impassioned life, as well as for 
subject and atmosphere, it does not seem 
whimsical to associate with Hawthorne's 
Marble Faun. The conclusion is tragic, 
granted ; but the tragedy is of that kind 
that purges and purifies — it is radically 
different from the ironic sadness of James* 
later stories. Its author, practically iden- 
tical with Roland, the patron of Hud- 
son, the gifted young painter, is not 
the detached observer of his characters 
he afterwards becomes. And it is largely 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 125 

the Time-spirit that has made him finally 
an on-looker at Life's feast, watching with 
satiric resignation the march of Fate. In 
Roderick Hudson, in the earlier books in 
general, the writer is, as it were, implicated 
in the action, and grieves with the reader 
if the end be untoward. Little by little 
in James' development comes the sense 
of the hopelessness of the personal 
struggle. The romantic view of life, 
interwoven of dark and light, is ex- 
changed for a quiescent pessimism that, 
because it is well-bred and' not noisy, 
is none the less sardonic. 

In "The American, almost contemporane- 
ous with the great story just named, and 
with it showing James in his heydey of 
power, the transition to the maturer mood 
is under way, but the balance between 
romanticism and realism is not yet de- 
stroyed and the result is a very rich, vital 
piece of fiction. Daisy Miller, a year or 
two later, being satiric in the lighter vein, 
is not so instructive for our purposes, 
although the romantic connotation is suffi- 
ciently absent. Nor does 'The Portrait of 
a Lady, in 1881, represent the altered 
James in high relief. These two books 



126 LITERARY LIKINGS 

are the successful work of a great artist 
slowly moulded by his philosophy (only in 
part by his temperament) into an unfriend- 
liness with life. And his philosophy 
means, as it does with any man, his per- 
sonal assimilation of the philosophy of 
his time. Recall the Bostonians, Princess 
Cassamassimia, The Tragic Muse, The Other 
House, and The Spoils of Poynton, with the 
many volumes of short tales of which 
the recent 'Terminations is a fair example, 
— fiction standing for the past dozen 
years of labor, — and see if what may 
be called inconclusiveness of plot or story 
be not a striking element. And what 
is this inconclusiveness but the agnostic 
in literature, who limns character in the 
clutch of Nemesis? Add to this charac- 
teristic, indirection of manner, increasing 
attention to subtleties of detail, and a 
keener edge of cynicism, and you have 
the main traits of the present James. 

The change of this American novelist 
under the influence of the Time-spirit, as 
compared with his foreign fellows, Daudet 
and Bjornson, is a more shadowy thing, 
something to be felt subjectively rather 
than analytically described. It would be 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 127 

a crude statement to say that the latest 
books end badly, are more unpleasant than 
the earlier. It is not enough to say that 
one hears a steady diminuendo of the 
romantic note. But it is true that one 
closes The Other House, or The Spoils of 
Poynton, or any one of the several collec- 
tions of tales recently written, with a sense 
of despair — despair at the helplessness of 
humanity in the hands of a law inexorable 
as the law of gravitation and well-nigh as 
impersonal. One might say that for the 
romanticism which makes room for the 
heroic and for the aspiration which shapes 
character is substituted the romanticism 
of a disappointed poet who cannot escape 
his birthright, but who intellectually is out 
of sympathy with it. Thus, as it seems 
to me, the fiction of James, progressively 
studied, is as instructive in illustrating 
the influence of the Time-spirit as is the 
work of the other two writers. His indi- 
viduality being differentiated from theirs 
in many ways, the result is distinct and 
different. But it is the one force working 
upon the three. With Bjornson, practical 
social protest ; with Daudet, a dramatic 
statement of the modern social complex 



128 LITERARY LIKINGS 

in cities ; with James, more abstract, more 
purely psychological, the dissonance be- 
tween action and opportunity. 



The influence, then, of the Time-spirit 
upon these important modern writers, rep- 
resenting different lands, can be traced 
clearly enough in their progressive work. 
It has pushed them in the direction of 
what in literary parlance is called Realism, 
and what, regarding their books as a 
moral product, may be described as spirit- 
ual discontent or despair. I repeat that 
always the most earnest and thoughtful 
of the makers of literature at a given time 
are indicators of the soul-pressure. It is 
no mere coincidence that the growth of 
realism into a dominant literary creed has 
been contemporaneous with the incoming 
of scientific conceptions. 

Literature inevitably reflects the intel- 
lectual and moral problems of a period ; 
ours is no exception. I do not go into 
the question of whether the change that 
has come over these literary masters 
means more gain than loss. There has 



BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 129 

been both gain and loss. But it is inter- 
esting to note how sensitive is literature, 
as exemplified in the three men chosen 
for illustration, to the moral and mental 
growth of a given period. But what 
next? It is likely that with the readjust- 
ment of theological conceptions and the 
resultant new ethic, literature, as one of 
the things responsive to such change, will 
react towards idealism, expressing itself in 
work of a more optimistic temper and 
romantic in spirit. Indeed, such reaction 
has already begun in the young romantic 
school of English fictionists, led by Stev- 
enson and Kipling ; in the Scotch idyllists, 
Barrie, Crockett, and Maclaren ; and in 
scattered phenomena in other lands, as, 
for example, the symbolist poets of France 
and the French neo-idealism finding voice 
in the clarion call of a writer like Wagner. 
A substantial gain will result from the 
wonderful realistic conquest. The com- 
placent, shallow optimism of old in litera- 
ture, its naive unnaturalness, are no longer 
possible. But so long as youth is youth 
romanticism cannot long remain absent 
from literature. Schools, creeds, tenden- 
cies, are temporary ; " they have their 



130 LITERARY LIKINGS 

day and cease to be." The love of ad- 
venture, the belief in the noble qualities 
of human nature, the hope of a fairer to- 
morrow making amends for a dark to-day, 
must " spring eternal in the human 
breast." These ideals must co-exist with 
man, and literature must return to them 
to have a vital existence. 



IDEALS IN AMERICAN LITER- 
ATURE 

¥ 

LOOKING to the future of American 
literature, the questions to-day most 
pertinent to its welfare are these : What 
are its younger makers believing ? and. 
What are they doing ? Before an answer 
is attempted, it is well to remind ourselves 
that America possesses a worthy and dig- 
nified literary past. The fact that our first 
great heptarchy of singers has lived and 
left a rich legacy of creative production is 
enough to justify the statement ; nor is 
the native accomplishment by any means 
limited to the work of Bryant, Whittier, 
and Emerson, of Longfellow, Poe, Holmes 
and Lowell. Time, which is as just in 
allotting a due period for vigorous ef- 
fort as it is inexorable in announcing the 
arrival of the age of weakness and deca- 
dence, is on the side of a land like ours, 



1 32 LITERARY LIKINGS 

young in years, materially strong, with its 
gaze by instinct forward and upward ; all 
natural laws of development, personal or 
national, declare in our favor. 

And as to themes and motives, surely 
no country offers more stimulus to literary 
endeavor. With its vast panorama of 
human types and diversified territories, its 
dramatic shifts of fortune, and its pressing 
problems and rapid changes in social con- 
dition, the United States affords a field 
not surpassed certainly by any one of the 
European nations where letters obtain 
recognition. The subject-matter is here, 
for those who have eyes to see and the 
forthright arm of performance. Never- 
theless, that our makers of literature are in 
some danger of becoming comparatively 
insensitive to such robust and legitimate 
stimuli is a conclusion forcing itself upon 
the earnest student. This is the day of 
the diffusion of culture and the spread of 
the cosmopolitan spirit, touching literature 
as they do all else : a fact which alone 
could explain that denationalization of 
themes and that adoption of transatlantic 
methods and models to be noted in some, 
though a minor part of, American work. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 133 

The very advance in the knowledge and 
practice of literature as an art makes this 
inevitable, indeed. Again, specialization, 
the study of particular environments and 
local types, obtains to the exclusion of 
broader national motives — this being ob- 
vious at a glance. 

But if a better technique, cosmopolitan- 
ism, and attention to the local rather than 
to the national may go some little way tow- 
ard explaining the indubitable change in 
the current mood and mind of our literati, 
the main cause is not here : it lies deeper 
and is further to seek. The trouble 
comes from what our literary producers 
believe, or are in danger of believing ; it is 
in what may be called the negative spirit 
which broods over modern effort in letters 
that the chief menace is to be found. And 
since doing follows believing, the work 
will suffer unless the creed be changed ; in 
truth, already has suffered, though in a 
less degree than is true of other lands 
where this mephitic influence strikes at the 
very vitals of all art. 

The spirit that denies, as embodied in 
Mephistopheles, eats like an acid into the 
heart of endeavor ; it is cynical and con- 



i 3 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

templative as against the creative and opti- 
mistic ; but in presentment is smug and 
decent, a la mode in dress, and with the 
devil's hoof well hidden. In literature 
it is " artistic," in the jargon of the day. 
The paramount temptation of the newer 
generation of literary makers in this coun- 
try is the acceptance, either by the con- 
scious will or by the unwitting creative 
soul, of the " art-for-art's sake " doctrine, 
that legacy of the French naturalistic 
school already, by the confession of its 
great leader, Zola, waning away after thirty 
years of dominance. In a sentence, this 
creed would sharply dissever art from 
ethics : it concedes no morality to litera- 
ture save the morality of the fine phrase ; 
it is the artist's business to reproduce 
nature, and he is in no wise implicated in 
the light-and-shade of his picture except 
to see to it that the copy is faithful. Taken 
over into fiction, poetry, and the drama 
from the sister art of painting, this banner- 
cry has resulted in a literary product 
whose foulness and lack of taste (accom- 
panied often by great ability) one must 
hark back to the decadent classics to 
parallel. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 135 

The originative cause of this significant 
movement and manifestation has not, so 
far as I have observed, been honestly set 
down. To say that it is the result simply 
of the increased perception of art, a nat- 
ural evolution of the broader conception 
of technique and the extension of the 
metier of literature, is to trifle with non- 
essentials, begging the whole question. 
The plain truth is that the mood in art 
and literature conveniently summarized by 
the cant term " art for art's sake " is be- 
gotten, in the last analysis, of spiritual 
unrest and the shift or abandonment of 
religious convictions and ethical ideals. 
The interrelation between art and ethics 
being intimate and indissoluble, any 
change in the one is registered in the 
other sooner or later, as certainly as a 
humor of the blood tells tales on the 
body's surface. Always in such a case the 
ethic of the time is to the art-expression 
as cause and effect. It is idle to pother 
with secondary causes when here is the 
native source. Our day is one of great 
religious upheaval, of the broadening and 
clarifying of ethical concepts, of personal 
as well as corporate re-adjustment of 



136 LITERARY LIKINGS 

creeds and canons. To ask all this seethe 
of thought and emotion to leave no trace 
upon art, which is the expression of man's 
psychologic and spiritual life in terms of 
power and beauty, were like expecting the 
face of a maelstrom to be as calm and 
motionless as a shady pool in a trout- 
brook. Men and women of the time, 
under the stress of giving up old beliefs 
and the acceptance of new, are for the 
moment shaken, confused ; some feel 
themselves afloat in a rudderless boat on 
a shoreless sea ; others, though at first 
dazed, glimpse land ahead and keep a firm 
hand on the helm. And the elect of 
letters, especially those of the younger 
generation, in proportion to their depth 
and breadth, reflect these storm-signs, are 
sensitive to this barometer of the ethic 
weather. 

Let us not dodge the fact : the morbid, 
the cynical, the naturalistic, and the deca- 
dent in our present-day literature, — all 
of this is, more than aught else, a sure 
emanation from the lack of faith and 
courage following on the loss (or at least 
change) of definite and canonical religious 
conviction. That it cannot always be 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 137 

traced to this efficient cause proves noth- 
ing ; it is said that a mushroom will 
appear above the earth an eighth of a 
mile from the fungus wood whence it 
springs ; yet dependent thereupon by a 
filament many times too small for seeing 
by the unaided human eye. 

But it would be a false representation 
of our age and country to bear down on 
its intellectual struggle in this most im- 
portant of thought-domains and omit to 
speak of its affirmative and altruistic side 
— the side of practical humanitarianism, 
broader, more enlightened, more in the 
spirit of Christ, in short, than the world 
has before witnessed. The overthrow of 
letter-perfect Bible-infallibility will do good 
in the end, and has already liberated 
people as well as dismayed them ; while 
the great lesson that a life of good is far 
more to be desired than a hard and fast 
adherence to a conservative creed begins 
to put forth lovely fruit in church and 
society. This spirit, too, is finding its 
strong expression in literature, and may 
be relied upon as a foil to the protuberant 
ugliness of the theory we are diagnosing. 
But this should not put us at ease with 



138 LITERARY LIKINGS 

cc art for art's sake." It is to literature 
what materialism is to thought ; and no 
robing in the splendors of Solomon can 
conceal the awful truth that death, not 
life, is in its person. Religion without 
spiritual activity is pithless formalism ; art 
without spirituality (or ethical beauty, 
which I hold to be the same thing) 
is again a whited sepulchre, full of stink- 
ing bones. 

It is not difficult to expose the fallacy 
of the creed which cries up manner as the 
be-all and end-all of art. A mere glance 
at world-literature proves beyond perad- 
venture that the moving and permanent 
forces are those which are healthful, vital, 
positive, optimistic. Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, and 
Browning are not decadents ; men, all of 
them, cognizant of life's depths as well as 
heights, but never forgetting that accom- 
plishment, aspiration, and peace are articu- 
lated into our living quite as truly as 
doubt, denial, and death. Hence these 
masters are open-air influences and a tonic 
to distraught humanity. The history of 
any puissant nation teaches the same 
thing ; its athletic evolution and crest of 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 139 

power mean a literature which is bracing 
and splendid, its devolution a product into 
which the minor note has crept and 
through which runs the self-questioning 
of decay. All records yield an irresistible 
Yea to the query, Does not the decadent 
in literature (when sincere and not an 
affectation) always square with a similar 
state of social and intellectual life in the 
nation ? To accept the poems, stories, 
and essays of the school in mind as legiti- 
mate and natural is to self-doom the coun- 
try's career and pronounce its noble work 
done and its maturity past — a claim so 
ridiculous as to be made only by a mad- 
man. 

One may be allowed the shrewd sus- 
picion that some of the decadent work 
of England in art and letters — for 
which such men as Oscar Wilde, George 
Moore, and Aubrey Beards! ey are respon- 
sible — is the result of a self-conscious 
pose, not of a reasoned conviction or an 
impulse of the blood. The negative 
spirit in England is bad enough and suf- 
ficiently incongruous, but even if fit for 
one of the leading lands of Europe would 
be peculiarly out of place here in the 



i 4 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

United States, forelooking to a great 
future. For American literature-makers 
to adopt — either consciously or uncon- 
sciously — the pessimism and dry-rot of 
France, Spain, Norway, and England is 
an anachronism analogous to that which 
Greece might have furnished if, in the day 
of Pericles, she had taken of a sudden to 
the pensive idyls of Theocritus and the 
erotic epigrams of Meleager. Our land, 
entering into its young heyday of national 
maturity, must develop a literature to 
express and reflect its ideals, or we shall 
display to the astonished world the spec- 
tacle of a vigorous people, hardly out of 
adolescence, whose voice is not the big, 
manly instrument suiting its years, but the 
thin piping treble of senility. Common 
sense and patriotism alike forbid such an 
absurdity. 

Again, aesthetics and philosophy declare 
art for art's sake to be a silly lie. The 
confusion in the conceptions of a true 
aesthetic arises from a too exclusive devo- 
tion to the indubitable fact that art is pri- 
marily a matter of manner, of form. It 
were idle to deny that form is the impera- 
tive condition of the acceptability of any 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 141 

work of art ; and, not unnaturally, the 
devotees of the current fallacy have 
jumped from this to the conclusion that 
form is everything, the only test of worth 
and rank being technique, — which is a 
palpable non sequitur. The so-called real- 
ists ignore (often, though not always) two 
potent elements in an art creation lying at 
the base of any sound theory of aesthetics : 
to wit, taste and selection. ^Esthetic taste 
decides what subject-matter comes within 
the purview of art, while the selective in- 
stinct chooses out the typical, relatively 
important phenomena which shall be re- 
produced in the magic peep-show of the 
artist. But taste is constantly and brutally 
violated by those who pride themselves on 
being veritists, on telling the truth at all 
hazards and about all things. The fiction 
of Guy de Maupassant, the poetry of 
Verlaine, and the plays of Hauptmann 
are in the way of spreading out before 
reader or auditor a dead-level of common- 
place, or favoring a deification of minutiae 
or a faithfulness in the transcription of 
vileness, as if art's crowning merit were 
the merit of the catalogue. Needless to 
say, this is not a characterization of their 



i 4 2 LITERARY LIKINGS 

work at large ; but these are the pitfalls 
into which their theory leads them betimes. 
Taste is trampled upon in the creator's 
lust for photographic re-statement ; not 
the moral nerves alone, but those that 
resent disgustful associations as the senses 
resent ill-odors and discordant sounds, are 
outraged under the sacred name of Truth. 
Even were all this educative, the fact 
would remain that the aesthetic, which is 
the atmosphere of all artistic effort, is by 
this effort made impossible. 

Moreover, there is no reason for believ- 
ing that the dreary repetition of palpably 
sorrowful and sickening data of life, too 
well apprehended already by poor human- 
ity, is of use for either time or eternity. 
The greater need is an induction in a 
mood which rises superior to these antino- 
mies, bracing up men for hopeful, manly 
work, and, if so may be, for loving wor- 
ship. It should be the purpose "of all 
good craftsmen," says J. A. Symonds, 
" not to weaken, but to fortify, not to dis- 
pirit and depress, but to exalt and animate." 
And Robert Louis Stevenson, with the 
end-of-the-century literary product in mind, 
remarks with his wonted perception that 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 143 

"it would be a poor service to spread cult- 
ure, if this be its result, among the com- 
paratively innocent and cheerful ranks of 
men/' If, as he adds, it be necessary 
nowadays to have a great deal of puling 
over the circumstances in which we are 
placed," in Heaven's name let it be done 
off the scenes, not in the presence of the 
audience. 

In the inartistic indifference to selection, 
too, these soi-disant realists are guilty of a 
fatal mistake and overlook a fundamental 
requisite. The numbing of the aesthetic 
sensibilities so that offal is not recognized 
as such can be understood as the slow 
result of pseudo-education; but the ignor- 
ing of proportion, of choice of subject, of 
light and shade, of planes and values in 
the very professions which must learn 
these things as the A B C of their art, 
may be set down as an exhibition of stu- 
pidity. I use the hack-words of the 
painter, but with literature in view. To 
devote as much care and space and em- 
phasis in a novel to the maunderings of 
a drunkard or the coquetries of a harlot, 
neither of whom represents cases of fallen 
and still fitfully re-emergent nobility, but 



i 4 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

who belong to the rank and file of inef- 
fective and bourgeois sin, — to give such 
character- types more attention and accent 
than is bestowed upon those of larger 
bulk and more ideal significance is an 
example of crass and vulgar misjudgment, 
and this entirely aside from all considera- 
tions of taste and morale. Du Maurier 
in giving the world his Trilby gave it 
also an example of the true artist's hand- 
ling of such a theme, teaching the noble 
lesson of ethical growth in the case of a 
grisette, and so preserving moral balance 
in the depiction of Bohemian scenes and 
actions. Eliminate taste from art, and its 
corollary, the selective act of the artist in 
the midst of his raw material, and you 
reduce it to the methods of science and to 
the products of an unenlightened industry. 
But philosophically, once more, the 
theory does not hold ; if it is false aesthet- 
ics, it is also false psychology. Beauty is 
the one desideratum of all artistic creation ; 
beauty in its broadest content, to include 
grandeur and the solemn effects following 
on the representation even of noble terror 
and sorrow. And Beauty, be it observed, 
is in all respectable philosophic analysis 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 145 

since Plato, not a quality confined within 
the domain of the aesthetic, but at root a 
spiritual thing. Plato in declaring the 
True, the Good, and the Beautiful to be 
phases of the one great principle enun- 
ciated, once and for all, what Philosophy 
must but repeat ; left a dictum not accept- 
able because it is the utterance of the great 
Greek, but because his were the insight 
and the imagination to grasp what is one 
of the inexpugnable verities of Thought. 
It was this enlarging theory which Em- 
erson never tired of championing ; it was 
with this in his soul that Ruskin — 
prophet fallen upon evil days among 
younger schools who sneer at him as " lit- 
erary " — said that two things enter into the 
greatness of a picture : first, the subject ; 
second, the treatment; or, to rephrase 
it, inspiration and technique — and not 
technique alone. The beautiful in art, 
then, can no more be separated from 
ethics, from the spiritual, than can flesh 
and blood in the vital organism. Being 
the subtlest, most precious thing in art, 
it is to be above all else desired, striven for, 
and yearned after, and without it as an 
incentive and an ideal, the detail of a 



146 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Meissonier or the metrical wonders of a 
Verlaine are of small avail. It offers, 
moreover, an infallible touchstone in the 
grading of all art-work. If there be no 
choice in the sort of life spread out by the 
artist, if the instinct of lust dissected with 
truth and power be as interesting, as in- 
trinsically valuable and beautiful, as the 
instinct of worship, then are all gradua- 
tions destroyed, and it is idle for man to 
struggle up out of his primeval apehood 
toward kinship with the angels. Thus 
stripped of ambiguity, few will refuse to 
grant the idiocy of this attitude ; yet all 
who contend for art for art's sake im- 
plicitly put faith in the argument. To try 
to turn ethics out of art is as foolish as 
to sweep back the sea with a broomstick. 
Nature, driven out by the Horatian pitch- 
fork, will surely return again, and healthy- 
minded humankind can never be cajoled 
by the cant of the ateliers into believing 
for a moment that deftness of flesh-tints 
and truthfulness in character-drawing are 
the equivalents of purity in artistic concep- 
tion and the inspiration of the creative 
imagination. 

The younger literary folk of the United 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 147 

States, then, are brought face to face with 
certain hard facts, and are bidden choose. 
They may follow older lands, letting the 
popular theory of the day generate and 
guide their work, thereby laying them- 
selves open to the charge of imitation, un- 
Americanism, false aesthetics, and false 
psychology. Contrariwise, keeping a firm 
grip on the essential truth that a sound 
and efficient technique must bottom Amer- 
ican literature as it must that of any and 
all lands, they may nevertheless have clear 
in sight the still broader and deeper verity 
that " beauty is truth, truth beauty," that 
in the ethic atmosphere only can the crea- 
tive find its homeland and natural breath- 
ing-place, beauty being, in the words of 
Matthew Arnold, "truth seen from 
another side." We are aware that some 
critics, good men and true, having the 
best interests of our native literary and 
art production at heart, are fond of laying 
chief stress on the need of an unprovincial 
comparison of our work with other centres 
of civilization, in order to avoid a fatal 
self-sufficiency and the exclusive use of 
local standards, — a kind of literary Chau- 
vinism. And coincident with this they 



148 LITERARY LIKINGS 

talk continually of technique, and deem it 
our crying duty just now to ensure that, 
lest talent and enthusiasm run to waste. 
Their word has its share of truth, but in 
view of this infinitely graver menace im- 
plied in the acceptance of an illogical and 
soulless principle and method, sure if gen- 
erally received to result in malformation 
in place of wholesome growth, it may well 
be ranked as of secondary importance. I 
believe heartily that our litterateurs are by 
comparison scot-free from the worst phases 
of the delusion ; the work being done on 
all sides is vital and vigorous. 

Indeed, the negative spirit, the cynic 
mood, and the manner of the realist or the 
pessimist belong, with us, rather to the 
critics than to the creators, the latter being 
as a class (though exceptions will occur 
to all) sound at heart and only eager to do 
work which shall be sane, broad, truthful, 
and wholesome. The criticism which con- 
tinually depresses a fine young extrava- 
gance, which reiterates the sacerdotal func- 
tion of art-minus-morals, and which sneers 
down admiration for local impulses and 
data, is not wanting in the United States. 
Though perhaps not representative, it 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



49 



exists, and so does a corresponding coterie 

among the literary folk themselves. 

An American literature such as is in 
mind, and which if true to our literary 
forbears we must make, shall be at once 
practical and ideal ; practical, since it is the 
honest expression of national life and 
thought; ideal, for that it presents not 
facts alone, but symbols — is not merely 
photographic, but artistic, by reason of its 
sensing the relative proportion of things 
and the all-important role of imaginative 
representation. Such a school of writers 
will beget poets and novelists who are also 
patriots, clasping clean and loyal hands, 
and taking an inextinguishable joy in their 
work, which they hope shall be for the 
healing of the nation. And all the people 
will say, Amen. 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES IN 
ROBERT BROWNING'S POETRY. 1 



THERE are three ways of learning 
about the culture life of a past people 
or period. One may read formal history 
concerning it : this way, the way most 
common and easy, is least interesting and 
least satisfactory. One may read contem- 
porary documents : and this, the way of 
scholarship, is more excellent, but often 
full of difficulties not to be overborne by 
the general. Or one may read some 
writer who, having become saturated with 
the spirit of his epoch, gives it out in the 
way of literature — appeals not alone to 
the knowledge, but to the emotion and 
imagination. This method alone really 
vitalizes the past for us. It makes by- 
gone figures move and breathe, bygone 

i Read before the Boston Browning Society, October 26, 
1897. 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 151 

events become credible because actual to 
the mind's eye. 

There is little danger, I fancy, in over- 
estimating the debt we all owe to literature 
in thus reconstructing historic life. Think 
of the contributions to historic fiction : 
Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Bulwer, Steven- 
son, Sienkiewicz ! I read a number of 
the authoritative histories of Rome, and 
know more or less of Caesar and his city ; 
I read Shakespeare's c Julius Caesar/ and 
walk with that great man in the Forum, 
or feel the dagger of Brutus in his breast, 
and this in spite of anachronisms a-many 
and naive indifference to archaeological 
verisimilitude. The Iron Duke once 
remarked that he had learned all his his- 
tory from the master-poet. Some admir- 
able words by Woodrow Wilson are worth 
repeating here : 

cc How are you to enable men to know 
the truth with regard to a period of revo- 
lution? Will you give them simply a 
calm statement of recorded events, simply 
a quiet, unaccented narrative of what 
actually happened, written in a monotone, 
and verified by quotations from authentic 



1 52 LITERARY LIKINGS 

documents of the time? You may save 
yourself the trouble. As well make a 
pencil sketch in outline of a raging confla- 
gration; write upon one portion of it 
c flame/ upon another c smoke ; ' here 
' town hall where the fire started/ and there 
' spot where fireman was killed/ It is a 
chart, not a picture. Even if you made a 
veritable picture of it, you could give 
only part of the truth so long as you 
confined yourself to black and white. 
Where would be all the wild and terrible 
colors of the scene : the red and tawny 
flame; the masses of smoke, carrying the 
dull glare of the fire to the very skies like 
a great signal banner thrown to the winds ; 
the hot and frightened faces of the crowd ; 
the crimsoned gables down the street, 
with the faint light of a lamp here and 
there gleaming white from some hastily 
opened casement? Without the colors 
your picture is not true. No inventory 
of items will ever represent the truth : the 
fuller and more minute you make your 
inventory, the more will the truth be 
obscured. The little details will take up 
as much space in the statement as the 
great totals into which they are summed 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 153 

up ; and, the proportions being false, the 
whole is false. Truth, fortunately, takes 
its own revenge. No one is deceived. 
The reader of the chronicle lays it aside. 
It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot realize 
how any of the things spoken of can have 
happened. He goes elsewhere to find, 
if he may, a real picture of the time, and 
perhaps finds one that is wholly fictitious. 
No wonder the grave and monk-like 
chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to 
be read, and not merely for the manual 
exercise of it; and when he sees readers 
turn away, his heart misgives him for his 
fellow-men. Is it as it always was, that 
they do not wish to know the truth ? 
Alas ! good eremite, men do not seek the 
truth as they should; but do you know 
what the truth is ? It is a thing ideal, dis- 
played by the just proportion of events, 
revealed in form and color, dumb till 
facts be set in syllables, articulated into 
words, put together into sentences, swung 
with proper tone and cadence. It is not 
resolutions only that have color. Nothing 
in human life is without it. In a mono- 
chrome you can depict nothing but a 
single incident: in a monotone you cannot 



154 LITERARY LIKINGS 

often carry truth beyond a single sentence. 
Only by art in all its variety can you 
depict as it is the various face of life." 

Robert Browning has performed this 
noble service for us with respect to Italy 
and that intensely alluring phase of human 
culture and progress known as the Renais- 
sance. In familiar words he sang — 

" Open my heart and you will see 
Graven inside it, ' Italy.' " 

And this was no rhetorical vaunt, but very 
truth. The English poet assimilated with 
a sympathy unique among his compeers 
the past and present of that wonderful 
land. And as a result, he, in a large frac- 
tion of his work, reflected its life, the 
body and soul of it, as no other literary 
maker has begun to do. Its heart and 
intellect, its passion, art, music, literature, 
and scholar lore, are interpreted by him not 
as the pundit or archaeologist or historic 
reporter would do it, — not for the fact's 
sake, — but after the manner of the poet, 
— for the life's sake, as one part of the 
mighty story of man's spiritual conflict 
and growth. 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 155 

The question is sometimes raised whether 
the past can really be recalled and repict- 
ured with even approximate accuracy. 

Is it Rome or the playwright's more or 
less ignorant idea of Rome that we are 
given ? This is, after all, only a phase of 
the old argument of the absolute idealist : 
we know, not matter, but our notion 
thereof. For practical purposes the way- 
faring man has decided that matter exists ; 
that if he butts with his head against a stone, 
the stone will be there and will hurt him. 
Likewise in this matter of reconstructing 
vanished things, it can never be proven 
that the literary presentation of historical 
characters and scenes is correct or half cor- 
rect. The dead must needs come back to 
settle that for us. But this much may 
safely be asserted; of two ideas of those 
characters and scenes, that will do the most 
for us, and hit nearest to the truth, which 
seems vital and warm and veritable — 
which enables us to realize that such scenes 
have been, such characters have lived and 
died. In the utter absence of conclusive 
proof, we have quite as good a right to 
claim that literature can make us ac- 
quainted with the centuries foregone as 



156 LITERARY LIKINGS 

our opponent has to claim that to be im- 
possible. 

Browning, then, has given a superb 
gallery of Renaissance (as well as other) 
historic pictures, re-creating with dynamic 
force and virile imagination the evidence 
of things not seen. His method in doing 
this is all his own, and calls for a word of 
comment. As it seems to me, Robert 
Browning's tendency to the minutiae of 
learning, to what may be called archaeolog- 
ical detail, is bad in itself and injures his 
work. Here at the start let me say that 
while I yield to no one in honest admiration 
and love of this puissant maker of litera- 
ture, I do regard him as one of the most 
unequal of poets, and a man successful in 
spite of his faults, not because of them. 

To come to a special illustration af- 
forded by this Renaissance group of poems 
(and the stricture applies equally to the 
Browning historical poems in general) : 
they do, indubitably, assume too much 
knowledge on the student's part ; plunge 
too much in medias res, as it were ; and by 
a recondite multiplicity of particulars put 
us in danger of not seeing the forest for 
the trees. That the poet, maugre this 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 157 

trait, does on the whole interest us in the 
past, and stimulate us mightily by his pict- 
ures of it, is a wonderful tribute to his 
genius. His imagination seizes on all the 
intellectual furnishment of the poems 
until they become molten in that creative 
heat, and plastic to his shaping. A lesser 
man with Browning's method, in this field, 
would be insufferably dull, hopelessly un- 
poetical. At times even he succumbs to 
it, and is — I say it with humility — both 
unpoetic and dull. Let us take that crux 
Sordello — first of the poems illuminating 
my theme, — and see if the criticism ap- 
plies in that case. The story of a poet's 
inner life in an Italian thirteenth-century 
setting, which is the theme, seems, for a 
psychologic writer and fellow-bard like 
Browning, eminently fitting : the develop- 
ment of Sordello's life and character, during 
which he loses himself only to find himself 
in death, has a subtle fascination. But the 
question presents itself: In order to make a 
background for such a figure, was it neces- 
sary or advisable to embroil the reader in 
such an historical tangle of events ? Could 
not the psychologic problem — the study of 
a gifted, aspiring soul, suffering from self- 



158 LITERARY LIKINGS 

consciousness and paralysis of the will — 
have been put before the world with simpler 
mise en scene? and does not the intricacy of 
the stage setting constitute a main reason 
why this production of a very young singer 
and thinker is confessedly one of the most 
difficult he has ever offered as a stumbling- 
block for the simple man and a choice morsel 
for Browning societies ? I think we must 
say " Yes." It is this, together with the oc- 
cult expression, the overplus of metaphys- 
ics, and the lack of organic arrangement, 
which brings about a result I for one can- 
not but deprecate. The teaching, that 
only in Love can life find its true key, and 
that the Poet — in Browning's mind the 
ideal leader and purveyor of the higher 
knowledge — must think not of himself 
nor even of his art primarily, but of the 
welfare of brother-man, and that act and 
ideal must walk in healthy union, is noble 
surely, and typical of the mature Brown- 
ing ; but the manner of conveying this — 
there's the rub ! Can Sordello be under- 
stood without a key ? Can it with that 
aid, or at any rate without much vexation 
and weariness of the flesh ? To judge by 
my own experience, the reply is a negative. 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 159 

Those to whom it truly is a lucid and 
steadily inspiring creation are of a supe- 
rior order of being — an order I admire 
from afar, but may not fellow with. But 
the whole poem is one thing, parts and 
passages quite another. In our quest for 
Renaissance pictures Sordello often re- 
wards us ; Heaven forbid I should deny it. 
The Guelph and Ghibelline feuds and the 
Lombard League are interwoven with the 
personal history of the protagonist ; and if 
after a reading of the poem we do not un- 
derstand those far-away and involved inter- 
necine quarrels, we do have ideas or images 
of mediaeval life — its hot gusts of passion, 
its political ambitions, its fierce, coarse 
brutalities, its lyric episodes of love, its 
manifold picturesqueness — such as no 
mere chronicle could have given us. And 
this because a poet, saturating himself with 
contemporaneous documents in the British 
Museum, and thereafter visiting the scenes 
he would depict, really was able to recon- 
struct a long-done piece of human action 
so that it had body and soul, heat and sub- 
stance. As a single brief example, take 
this passage from the third book, where 
Sordello returns to Verona at the call of 
his mistress, Palma: 



160 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" . . . F the palace, each by each, 

Sordello sat and Palma : little speech 

At first in that dim closet, face with face 

(Despite the tumult in the market-place) 

Exchanging quick low laughters : now would rush 

Word upon word to meet a sudden flush, 

A look left off, a shifting lips' surmise — 

But for the most part their two histories 

Ran best thro' the locked fingers and linked arms. 

And so the night flew on with its alarms 

Till in burst one of Palma' s retinue ; 

' Now, Lady ! ' gasped he. Then arose the two 

And leaned into Verona's air, dead-still. 

A balcony lay black beneath until 

Out, 'mid a gush of torchfire, gray-haired men 

Came on it and harangued the people : then 

Sea-like that people surging to and fro 

Shouted, * Hale forth the carroch — trumpets, ho, 

A flourish ! Run it in the ancient grooves ! 

Back from the bell ! Hammer — that whom behooves 

May hear the League is up ! Peal — learn who list, 

Verona means not first of towns break tryst 

To-morrow with the League ! ' 

Enough. Now turn — 
Over the eastern cypresses : discern ! 
Is any beacon set a-glimmer ? 

Rang 
The air with shouts that overpowered the clang 
Of the incessant carroch, even : ' Haste — 
The candle's at the gateway ! ere it waste, 
Each soldier stand beside it, armed to march 
With Tiso Sampier through the eastern arch I 999 



> 






RENAISSANCE PICTURES 161 

As we read this and similar passages we 
get a sense surely of that day of feudalism 
and chivalry, of vari-colored splendor, 
well-nigh barbaric personal conduct, and 
dire cruelties, beauty and cruelty clashing 
together like iron and gold, — a day of 
crude, strong contrasts, of impressive chia- 
roscuro. To run over a selected page of 
Browning is to comprehend this more 
vividly than by studying the whole of 
Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, noble work 
as that is. Such is the service of dynamic 
literature. Such is rendered only in flashes 
by Sordello. This, and its psychologic 
suggestion, constitute the main value of 
the poem. 

If we turn to The Grammarian* s Fu- 
neral, we shall find a picture almost steadily 
true poetry, that with rarest insight and 
grasp portrays the scholar-side of the age, 
as the other does its politico-religious 
strife. It seems a parlous thing, a priori, 
to make the figure of a philologist pathetic. 
But Browning does it. The importance 
of learning has never been more nobly 
limned. To be sure, this grammarian is 
no philologer in our modern sense : the 
study of language was to him a means, not 



i6z LITERARY LIKINGS 

an end, — but that is true of all great 
word-wizards mediaeval and modern ; men, 
for example, like the brothers Grimm in 
Germany. 

I know of no lyric of the poet's more 
representative of his peculiar and virile 
strength than this, in that it makes vibrant 
and thoroughly emotional an apparently 
unpromising theme. In relation to the 
Renaissance, to the age of the revival of 
learning, the moral is the higher inspiration 
derived from the new wine of the classics, 
so that what in later times has cooled down 
too often to a dry-as-dust study of the 
husks of knowledge is shown to be, at the 
start, a veritable revelling in the delights 
of the fruit — the celestial fruit which for 
its meet enjoyment called for more than a 
life span, and looked forward, as Hutton 
has it, to an " eternal career." Note that 
the faith in a future life conditions and en- 
larges the view ; as yet the scientific atti- 
tude and mind had not come to the latter- 
day agnosticism. And how picture-like 
Browning makes it ! The solemn proces- 
sion up the mountain, the master, " famous 
calm, and dead," in the midst, loftily lying 
in his aerial sepulchre among the clouds 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 163 

(and intermittently the directions interpo- 
lated to give dramatic reality), — here again 
the traditions and ideals of the time are con- 
veyed indirectly, and therefore with three- 
fold force ; the poetry of it is the chief 
thing, the one thing, in sooth, for the 
general reader. For let us bear in mind 
ever that any poet's first mission is to de- 
light, not to instruct. The instructions 
should be unawares, by indirection. The 
poet who confounds the two is in danger 
of the council, as a didactic philosopher, 
or a metaphysician, or a scientist, — good 
roles all, but not his. 

The Grammarian s Funeral, then, is a 
noble vindication of the possibilities rather 
than the probabilities of that calling, hav- 
ing its historic interest in the implied high 
aims in scholarship of the time contrasted 
with later periods. No one Renaissance 
characteristic stands out in higher relief 
than this of learning. It is amazing how 
it cohabits with lust, cruelty, and what 
seems to our modern sensibilities an 
inconceivable lack of ethical development, 
existing in a devotion and an attainment 
that even now seem marvellous. The 
middle-age humanists were wonderful in 



164 LITERARY LIKINGS 

this respect. Scholarship is one of the 
most brilliant facets flashed down to us 
from that many-colored stone called the 
Renaissance. 

The art side of the re-birth, a phase 
best loved by our poet, if one may judge 
by the frequency with which he wrote of - 
it (to say nothing of his easy intimacy 
with all its figures, principles, and scenes), 
is illustrated in that very characteristic and 
truly great dramatic monologue, Fra Lippo 
Lippi. 

The wayward child of genius is a fasci- 
nating object of study always ; here is the 
type in the ecclesiastico-art atmosphere, 
with its dual blend of elements which did so 
much for Italian painting, and the golden 
period of creative picture-making. Sup- 
pose some one to take up the poem and 
to read it with no preparatory study of 
the harum-scarum monk artist, and only 
such knowledge of the stage-setting as 
would be commanded by a person of fair 
education. No doubt such an one would 
lose much, especially in this most repre- 
sentative genre of Browning's, the dramatic 
monologue, which, by its very method, 
assumes so much on our part and pro- 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 165 

gresses by revealing character, not by narra- 
tive in the usual sense. Yet I am much mis- 
taken if a vivid sense of medievalism and 
of the Renaissance were not the result. 
In the first place, Fra Lippo is visualized 
and vitalized — no mere name he on the 
left-hand lower corner of his canvases, 
after reading the poem, but a very human 
flesh and blood creature, with a Bohemian- 
ish streak in him that makes serenades 
and moonlight and luring girl-faces irre- 
sistible to him, so that he must perforce 
take French leave of his fine quarters in 
the Medici palace and roam the streets in 
quest of frolic adventure, to be brought 
up with a sharp turn by the Florentine 
officials. It is all delightfully disreputa- 
ble and human. Fra Lippo, in Italy, 
Villon, a not far from contemporaneous 
son of genius in another art and land, we 
come to know because whereas in their 
work we think of them on the side of 
gift and power — in their erring natural 
lives we recognize the touch of nature that 
makes the whole world kin. And then, 
too, how dramatically we are presented 
with the fact of the more or less unholi- 
ness of those in holy orders at that time ! 



1 66 LITERARY LIKINGS 

This we are aware of theoretically : in a 
poem like Fra Lippo Lippi it is worked 
out in a scene with an ex-monk as hero, 
and what was assumed as history is 
clothed on with life. And still further : 
what a glimpse of mediaeval Florence is 
given — beautiful lily of the Arno ! We 
may cry with the poet, " It's as if I saw 
it all ! " 

" Here's spring come, and the nights one makes up 
bands 
To roam the town and sing out carnival." 

We feel the street-life, and we visit the 
convent, with its cluster of brothers agape 
with admiration at this early realist who 
paints people as they are, until the monk- 
ish circle is instructed by the Prior that 
that way is all wrong, — 

" Your business is to paint the souls of men. " 

The description and criticism of the faults 
and virtues of the art creed and art ac- 
complishment of the time are wonderfully 
acute. Lippi was wiser than his critics, 
knowing " The value and significance of 
flesh," and in spite of all his tomfoolery 






RENAISSANCE PICTURES 167 

and looseness is an idealist, and so hangs 
on to the belief that the world " means 
intensely and means good." 

In dramatic pieces like this, and the 
still greater Andrea del Sarto, we are let 
into the very heart and get the blood-beat 
of the blooming-time of creative painting. 
If ever a phase of life were done from the 
inside, as we say, it is here : for once we 
are given "The time and the place and 
the loved one all together/' 

The range and variety of Browning in 
his Renaissance picture-making is again 
exemplified in the very different poem, 
"The Bishop orders his Tomb." Here 
we have limned for us the religious world 
on its side of ecclesiastical form, pomp, 
and show. It is revealed through the 
person of a Roman prelate who is seamy 
in his life, and worldly and worldly-wise on 
his deathbed, in articulo mortis. It is a 
terrible picture in its way ; another intense 
monologue in form, and vibrant with 
emotion — spite of its rough, interjacula- 
tory manner. Art is illustrated from 
another angle : this soiled, proud, passion- 
ate, envious bishop, a good hater to the 
last, would have his monument a master- 



168 LITERARY LIKINGS 

piece, and how splendid his description of 
it, particular on particular, until the mind's 
eye sees the imposing, costly thing! He 
has the age's scholarship, too, and would 
have naught but good Latin* inscribed on 
the stone ; and in all his piteous request to 
his equally worldly sons he knows, poor 
worldling, that they will take his riches 
and never grant his last prayer. A sense 
of the selfish human animal, the same in all 
centuries, is conveyed savagely, truthfully, 
by this dramatic poem ; while the local 
media are also brought before us in a 
wonderful way. The historical setting is 
not so much thought of here; the atmos- 
pheric impression is everything. Yet at 
what other period, in what other country, 
would a bishop have the intimate knowl- 
edge of and taste for architecture shown 
in this man's talk — let alone his wish for 
aesthetic propriety and fitness at a moment 
when secondary things and things not 
taking hold on the central core of being 
pass out of mind ? How could the fact 
that the bishop cared supremely for an 
artistically beautiful sepulchre — cared for 
it as much as he did to crow over a rival 
in effigy — be more strikingly set before 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 169 

us, and we be instructed at once in the 
main passions and interests • of universal 
man and of Renaissance man ? Once 
again we emerge from the poem, having 
touched the body of the Renaissance and 
felt it to be not a cold corpse, but warm 
and moved by breath. 

The poem, The Heretic's Tragedy, still 
further illuminates our subject, and is one 
of those grim sardonic pieces very illus- 
trative of a certain phase of Browning's 
genius — a genre in which he has done 
some of his strongest work. This time it 
is that darker side of the Renaissance* 
social complex exploited by its theology. 
It is right not to forget this reverse side 
of the shield, in directing main attention 
to its splendid face whereupon art has 
carven deathless characters. I find a great 
relish in such a setting forth of the intel- 
lectualizing of a dark age — for in respect 
of the substance of religion it was dark 
compared with our own. How the poem 
plunges us back into an all but inconceiv- 
able atmosphere of hair-splitting dogma 
and inhuman heartlessness ! Man delights 
in the burning alive of his fellows : God is 
the jealous God of the old dispensation ; 



i jo LITERARY LIKINGS 

and how admirably this state of mind, 
naively unconscious of its own atrocity and 
crudity, is embalmed in this terrible dra- 
matic lyric, with its shuddering realism, 
whose effect is heightened tenfold by its 
awful joviality of tone : 

" Sling him fast like a hog to scorch, 

Spit in his face, then leap back safe, 
Sing ' Laudes ' and bid clap-to the torch." 

And, what is most pertinent to our pur- 
pose, — how pictorial it all is ! The poor 
wretch burning there can be seen as plainly 
by us as by the Paris mob that jeered at 
his contortions. Once more a far-away 
scene is not so much put before us on a 
flat surface as set about us atmospherically 
and with perspective, so that we are in it 
and of it. This is a wonderful thing to 
do, especially in a case where all is alien to 
our present notions. The poem is at once 
objective and subjective, a canvas and an 
emotional and moral experience. 

These Renaissance poems, then, — aside 
from their abstract virtue as intensely felt 
and virilely wrought verse, — perform one 
of the great and rare services possible to 
literature. They make us to know past 



RENAISSANCE PICTURES 171 

beliefs and feelings, people and actions, so 
that all becomes veritable and explicable : 
to know them not formally and by effort 
and intention, but spontaneously, through 
the dynamic communication of heat and 
light. Instead of the statics of knowledge 
we are given the dynamics of life. 



Old English Poetry 



I 

OLD ENGLISH POETRY 

THE day is fast arriving when attention 
will be paid to the treasures of our 
older English poetry as such. It is natural 
enough that the study of the language in 
its philological aspects should be prece- 
dent to an appreciation of the literary side 
of the subject. This has, in fact, been the 
case. But as special students of English 
have been long familiarizing themselves 
with the linguistic problems in connection 
with Old English work, the ground has 
been prepared for those whose chief inter- 
est is in the humanities, and who would 
use the acquired land as a field for the 
cultivation of the flowers of song. Signs 
are not lacking that what has been re- 
garded as the private preserves of special- 
ists will soon be the legitimate property of 
all lovers of literature. It is significant 
that an attempt to offer a literary transla- 



i 7 6 LITERARY LIKINGS 

tion of Beowulf, our first great English 
epic, by an American scholar, Professor 
Hall, of William and Mary College, has 
been followed hard on by another from 
English hands — that of Professor Earle. 
Dr. Gummere's recent admirable work on 
Germanic Origins, with its copious and 
spirited renderings from Beowulf and 
other Old English poems, is again a book 
pointing the same way. Mr. Stopford 
Brooke's fine Early English Literature is 
a later hopeful sign. 

It is high time, then, to approach the 
hoary remains of English song, not so 
much in the spirit of comparative philol- 
ogy as in that of aesthetic appreciation. 
In this mood I write of two obvious and 
representative aspects of this older litera- 
ture, which richly repay sympathetic study 
— a study which may be heartily bespoken 
it. A foreword as to nomenclature. I use 
the term Old English as synonymous with 
Anglo-Saxon and as preferable thereto ; it is 
the designation applied by progressive stu- 
dents to all our literary remains in Eng- 
land from the earliest monuments extant 
to about the middle of the twelfth century ; 
thence to the year 1500, say, we may 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 177 

speak of Middle English ; the remaining 
literature being denominated, of course, 
Modern English. Perhaps the strongest 
argument for thus naming our earlier 
literature is the emphasis it puts on the 
fact that we are dealing with but one 
tongue, seen in its varying stages of 
growth. An idea of the vital connection 
between Beowulf and Browning is thus 
inculcated ; whereas, if we say Anglo Saxon 
a feeling of something foreign in kind as 
well as distant in time is begotten. It is 
this oneness, this organic relation of the 
English language and literature through 
all sequences of its development, which is 
now being accented by scholars, and hence 
those terms are best which are in conform- 
ity with that conception. 

In spite of this assertion that our older 
poetry should be regarded as of a piece 
with what is more modern, it must be 
confessed frankly that at the first ap- 
proach to it the student is likely to be 
repelled, or, at any rate, given pause. 
On the threshold he is met with a rude 
setting aside of verse canons and con- 
ventions of to-day, while he is bidden to 
breathe an atmosphere which substitutes 



178 LITERARY LIKINGS 

a sharp and bracing keenness for the soft 
languors and southland allurements to 
which he may have been more accus- 
tomed. This poetry, forsooth ! This is 
barbaric, inchoate, an outrage on the 
aesthetic, and unworthy even of the nether 
slopes of Parnassus. Somewhat so runs 
his thought. But persisting in the will to 
get at one with this strange product, the 
same student in due time begins to feel 
the tonic of the air ; to habituate himself 
to the rough, bold grandeur of the 
scenery ; to enjoy the natural cadences of 
the wind that harps in his ear. In other 
words, what seemed irregularity of rhythm 
is seen to be a looser-moving but law- 
abiding metre; harshnesses of word-use 
reveal their fitness and vigor ; and a deep, 
rich music, a fuller-mouthed tone-color, is 
heard, such as modern words and melodies 
are more miserly in offering ; while uncouth 
inversions and sentence-gyrations resolve 
themselves into the fit and felicitous way 
whereby those gleemen of long ago vented 
the song and sentiment that was in them. 
And so there comes a real delight in the 
virile strength and grave sub-tones of 
music germane to Old English verse. 






OLD ENGLISH POETRY 179 

As is now pretty well understood, allit- 
eration, employed with regularity and 
artistic consciousness, is to Old English 
poetry what rhyme is to modern, the lat- 
ter being unknown. In offering a trans- 
lation, then, of such verse, its alliterative 
character, as well as its rhythmic character, 
may be reproduced when possible, or the 
more familiar and pleasing form, blank 
verse, be used. In the following papers 
the Old English line is used in the one 
case, blank verse in the other, that the two 
may be compared. As to the law of the 
use of alliteration, it is enough to say here 
that every normal Old English line has 
four accents, divided by a caesura, and that 
three of these — the first, second, and 
third — take the alliteration on the rhyth- 
mically accented word. Add to this that 
the lilt or measure is prevailingly trochaic 
with such intermixture of dactyls as to 
give a freer and less monotonous effect, 
and an intelligent notion of the mechan- 
ics of Old English poetry may be had. 
Thus it will be seen that the oldest verse- 
type in English is opposed in its move- 
ment to what may be called the modern 
verse-type, par excellence; namely, the 



180 LITERARY LIKINGS 

iambic pentameter as seen in blank verse. 
This fact suggests psychologic causes and 
offers a fascinating line of inquiry. How 
different the swing of the tripping trochees 
or leaping dactyls from the stately march 
of the line of Marlowe or Shakespeare ! 
I subjoin a single Old English line with 
the stresses marked, by way of illustra- 
tion : 

" Hale hilde-deor Hrothgar gretan." 
(" The hale hero, Hrothgar to greet. ,, ) 

Two other characteristics of Old Eng- 
lish verse remain to be mentioned — the 
metaphor and parallelism. The meta- 
phor is to our primary poetry what the 
simile is to its later development ; it is a 
stylistic feature permeating all Old Eng- 
lish writing, and it imparts an effect of 
vividness and force that give the literary 
product a distinct complexion of its own. 
Readers of the Elizabethan dramatists are 
aware what a leading role is there played 
by the metaphor — or kenning, as it is 
known in Old Norse poetry — when com- 
pared with its modern use. But with 
Shakespeare and his contemporaries the 
simile (which is only the metaphor ex- 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 181 

tended) is also made much of, sharing 
the rhetorical honors with its older fel- 
low-figure. But in the Old English days, 
the simile was practically undeveloped ; it 
was for a later and more self-conscious age 
to cultivate it. Thus, in the epic of 
Beowulf^ a composition of about 3,200 
lines, there is but one simile in the mod- 
ern expanded sense, while metaphors star 
every page. The gain in strength by this 
close-packed, terse figuration is immense. 
Again, Old English shares with Hebrew 
poetry the characteristic of parallelism 
or repetition of the thought in slightly 
altered phrasing. The Hebrew Script- 
ures offer hundreds of familiar and well- 
loved illustrations : " For a thousand 
years in thy sight are but as yesterday 
when it is past, and as a watch in the 
night." Similar constructions continually 
meet the student of Old English verse, or 
indeed of Germanic verse in general, 
whether English, Low or High German, 
or Scandinavian. At bottom this so- 
called parallelism is, in all probability, 
the creature of the emotional impulse 
which by the law of its being demands 
a wave-like repetend of the thought ex- 



1 82 LITERARY LIKINGS 

pressed, by clauses of parallel formation. 
The impulse, too, being emotional, is 
also rhythmical, and here is another 
reason for repetition. In Old English, 
however, what was in its genesis impul- 
sive and of the emotions became a 
formal mark of verse, and a most effec- 
tive rhetorical device, when skilfully 
managed. 

With these brief comments upon some 
of the most obvious phenomena of Old 
English poetry on its subjective and ob- 
jective sides, let us come at our study 
of two of its aspects. 






OLD ENGLISH POETRY 183 



II 

NATURE IN OLD ENGLISH 
POETRY 

¥ 

IN the epic of Beowulf ] our first great 
English epic, with almost countless ref- 
erences to the winter season, the sweet, 
antithetical season of summer is not once 
mentioned. This fact is significant, and 
stands for a good deal. At first it appears 
sufficiently astonishing. England is fair 
now in the season, and it was so at the 
end of the fourteenth century when Monk 
Langland began to sing : 

"Ina summer season 

When soft was the sun, 

I was weary of wandering, and went me to rest 

Under a broad bank by a bourne side." 

No winter rhyme this, of a truth. It was 
so, too, a hundred years earlier, in 1300, 
when a nameless poet warbled of spring in 
this wise : 

" Between the March and April, 
When sprays begin to spring, 



1 84 LITERARY LIKINGS 

The little fowls they have their will 
In their own way to sing." 

If this be the note of the bards in the 
year of grace 1400 or 1300, why not in 
the seventh or eighth century, five hun- 
dred years before, which is the presuma-. 
ble date of the Beowulf? It is hardly a 
satisfactory answer to say that the beauty 
of nature was there, but not the eyes to 
see it. Old English literature is rife with 
passages testifying to appreciation of the 
sterner moods of nature, a cognizance of 
her wintry phenomena, her rigors of land 
and sky and water. It is only on the side 
of warmth and bloom and fragrance that 
the poetry is so wofully lacking in expres- 
sion, so insensitive to loveliness and joy- 
ance. The explanation lies in large part 
elsewhere. To give one reason : the first 
poetry written down in England partakes 
of the atmosphere of the physical condi- 
tions of the country whence come the 
original settlers, namely, that of the low- 
lying lands of the Baltic, the North Sea, 
and the more northerly Atlantic. Beowulf 
itself, for example, is entirely un-English 
and Continental in its locale > the scene 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 185 

shifting from Denmark to Sweden. And 
so with the lesser poetical product : it is 
the climate of the lowlands, of Norwegian 
fiords and Danish nesses, that is in the 
English literature of the earliest period of 
production ; hence it is the darker and 
grimmer phases of nature which are voiced 
and pictured in the poetry. A striking 
illustration of this is to be seen in an Old 
English idiom. It was not the Anglo- 
Saxon's way to use the word "year" as a 
denominator of time ; he spoke of cc thirty 
of winters " instead of thirty years, evi- 
dently an unconscious tribute to the prom- 
inence of that cold and nipping season in 
his calendar. 

Another explanation of this fondness of 
our ancestors for winter landscape brings us 
within the domain of psychology. The 
first poetry of the race is pre-Christian, 
heathen in warp and woof; and in the 
literature which antedates Christianity — 
which has Odin and Thor in the heavens 
and fatalism as its ethical creed, instead of 
the sunburst of hope and joy which comes 
with the white Christ and his cheerier 
promises of happiness and heaven — the 
poetic spirit is distinctly, indubitably, more 



1 86 LITERARY LIKINGS 

joyless, less perceptive of the bright side 
of things. Nature, which to the modern 
poet is but the garment of God, was to his 
Old English forebears a chilling rather than 
an inspiriting spectacle ; for back of the 
myth-gods themselves stood Fate, Neces- 
sity, with laws that no man may dodge,- 
and with an iron will in place of a tender 
heart. Germanic mythology and literature 
give a lively sense of all this. 

These two causes, then (to mention no 
more), blend to bring about a fact which, 
at first blush, strikes the modern student 
as curious and repellent. 

As a result of this dominant note of 
winter in Old English poetry an effect of 
gloom and sternness is made on us, espe- 
cially if we come to the study full of the 
tropic exuberance and troubadour gayety 
which run through the literary product of 
the Romance peoples ; or if we are steeped 
in the bland brightness of classic imagery ; 
or, again, if we are conversant with the rich 
color and sensuous languors of some of the 
Oriental literatures. It is somewhat gray 
business, this harping on the one string, 
this chronicling of only such objective 
phenomena as are characteristic of the 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 187 

frozen earth and the ice-beaten sea. Yet 
if sunny charm and color-play and soft 
melody are wanting, there is great graphic 
power and a sort of wild music in many 
of the descriptions ; we get good etchings, 
strong black-and-white work, if not the 
landscapes of Claude and Turner; and 
there is stimulation for one who has been 
bred in softer pleasures to turn for the 
nonce from scented rose-gardens and lute 
tinklings to the sound of storm-swept 
pines, the smell of briny waters, and the 
sight of blood-flecked battle shields shaken 
in mortal combat. " Pretty " may not be 
the adjective to apply to such a poetic 
product, but " fine " and "strong" and 
" virile " emphatically are. 

Examples follow of the way in which 
the manifold demonstrations of the ex- 
ternal world wrought upon our forefathers, 
as they feasted, hunted, fought, and prayed 
in Saxon England more than a thousand 
years ago, and how this found vent in 
their song. In time, no doubt, we shall 
have the whole body of Old English poe- 
try in a form which will commend it to pop- 
ular use and appreciation ; as yet, how- 
ever, much remains to be done, and every 



1 88 LITERARY LIKINGS 

worker may contribute his mite. In turning 
the passage into modern English, I repeat, 
the Anglo-Saxon verse-line, with its four 
stresses, or accents, and its definite allitera- 
tion taking the place of the later device of 
rhyme, is reproduced as nearly as may be. 
Inevitably, the result is a metre of so much 
looser, less regular rhythm that an effect 
of carelessness and comparative formless- 
ness is produced on the reader familiar 
with more modern verse-laws. The 
rhymeless dithyrambs of Walt Whitman 
are at times suggested. But although the 
conception of metrical movement is freer, 
the laws that govern it are as exact and the 
artistic limitations as rigorously obeyed as 
anything that more recent poetry can show. 
It is a popular error to regard this early 
verse-product as rude and deficient in art. 
The long, striking, and beautiful lyric 
known as The Wanderer^ a truly repre- 
sentative poem in its sadness and full of 
the lament of personal bereavement, con- 
tains but two brief references to nature. 
This is an indication of how laconic is the 
early poet's use of this embellishment or 
accessory, which in modern times threatens 
to preempt the whole canvas at the expense 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 189 

of motifs and animated foregrounds. Even 
the most subjective of Old Eriglish poets 
was not satisfied to paint a picture for the 
mere picture's sake. The Wanderer, a 
minstrel, is imagined at sea, having lost 
all his friends, including the lord whose 
vassal he once was, and is thinking over 
his past with sick memory. Having 
dreamed of better times, when his lord 
clipped him and kissed him, while the 
bard in turn affectionately laid his hand 
and head on the kingly knee, he wakes to 
a realization of his present misery : 

" There awakeneth eft the woful man, 

Seeth before him the fallow waves, 

The sea fowls a-bathing, broadening their feathers, 

The rime and snow falling, mingled with hail. ' ' 

And the poem says that at the sight of 
this welter of storm-smit waters instead of 
the warm, feast-glad interior of the great 
hall — the scald's heart is made the heavier. 
It is a veritable etching, a sea piece in 
monochrome, and very typical. It may 
be said here that perhaps no one phenom- 
enon of nature plays so large a part in 
Old English literature as the sea, because 
it played so large a part in the life as well, 



i 9 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

and again was a monster that spoke the 
Saxon's sense of the change, the bigness, 
and the mystery of human days. It were 
interesting to trace its steady influence in 
the great singers of the race. Think what 
inspiration, what imagery, it has fur- 
nished Shakespeare, and a long train of 
successors down to Swinburne and Whit- 
man ! The epithet " fallow " as applied 
to the waves, in the lines just cited, is very 
fine, and shows the true selective felicity 
of poetry. In contrast with the gray 
clouds and the snow-filled air, the water 
would have taken on just that dusky yel- 
low tinge described by the word. The 
color scheme of the Anglo-Saxons, it may 
be remarked, was far more restricted than 
is ours to-day. Several of our commonest 
colors appear not at all, and light and 
shade seem to have made the strongest 
impression upon them. This fact is a 
curious commentary on a passage in one 
of Ruskin's lectures on art, where he re- 
marks that " the way by color is taken 
by men of cheerful, natural, and entirely 
sane disposition in body and mind, much 
resembling, even at its strongest, the tem- 
per of well-brought-up children ; " while, 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 191 

contrariwise, " the way by light and shade 
is taken by men of the highest power of 
thought and most earnest desire for truth ; 
they long for light, and for knowledge 
of all that light can show. But seeking 
for light, they perceive also darkness; 
seeking for substance and truth, they find 
vanity. They look for form in the earth, 
for dawn in the sky, and, seeking these, 
they find formlessness in the earth and 
night in the sky." It hardly seems amiss 
to name as exponents of the two types 
here adumbrated the man of Romance 
stock, sun-loving and insouciant, and the 
Teuton, with his mood bred of northern 
gloom and barrenness. 

The second passage in The Wanderer 
occurs near the close of the lyric. The 
singer gives a gloomy picture of the earth 
when the evil days come of loss and 
change, of age and desolation : 

"Storms shake the stony cliffs, 
The snow falls and binds the earth, 
The winter wails, wan dusk comes, 
The night-shade nips, from the north sends 
Rough hail, for harm to heroes. " 

This is vivid description, and proves a 
vigorous grasp of vocabulary and a happy 



1 92 LITERARY LIKINGS 

power in seizing on typically representa- 
tive features of a wintry landscape. It 
is not cataloguing, but the movement of 
the awakened imagination. 

In the mysterious, ill-defined lyric 
which Grein calls The Wifes Plaint, and 
which seems to tell of a woman exiled 
in a sad, dim wood, far away from her 
husband, there is a short description which 
again has shadow and sorrow for its set- 
ting, the woman's ill stead being echoed 
and transcribed in the phase of the exter- 
nal world which is presented. She is tell- 
ing of her banishment and the place of 
her abode : 

'« They bade me to dwell in the bushy woods, 
Under the oak-trees down in the earth caves. 
Old are the earth halls ; I am all-wretched ; 
Dim are the dens, the dunes towering, 
Dense the inclosures, with brambles engirt, 
The dwellings lack joy." 

The reference to The Wifes Plaint turns 
the mind instinctively to the longer and 
remarkable lyric known as The Ruin; 
only a fragment, but as precious in its 
way as one of Sappho's, and full of Old 
English feeling for the dark things of life, 
fairly revelling in descriptions of physical 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 193 

destruction. The subject is a city in 
ruined decay and neglect, and the poem 
deals scarcely at all with nature directly, 
but rather with the effects of time upon 
the work of men as seen in the fallen wall 
and tower and rain-pierced roof. In the 
tenth line, however, there is a touch 
worth noting. The artisan who built all 
this mighty structure, says the poet, is 
long dead, and now his work after him 
is crumbling to naught. But it was not 
always so. 

" Often yon wall 
(Deer-gray, red-spotted) saw many a mighty one 
Hiding from storms." 

The descriptive touch en parenthese is as 
accurate and careful as it is laconic. It 
implies real and fresh observation, and a 
wish for truthful representation. 

Another lyric which may well be placed 
in evidence is that called The Seafarer; 
it contains several descriptive passages 
which make it interesting for our partic- 
ular study. It pictures a lonely seafarer 
afloat on the waters, with the usual un- 
pleasant concomitants of bad weather and 
bleak season : 



i 9 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

"I may of mine own might a sooth-song sing, 

Say of my journeys how I through toilful days 

Often endured arduous times, 

Had to abide breast care full bitter, 

Knew on the ship many a sad berth, 

Fierce welter of waves, where oft they beat upon 

me 
In my narrow night-watch at the boat's bow, 
When it hurtled on the cliffs, conquered by the 

cold ; 
Then were my feet by the frost bitten, 
In fetters bleak. . . . No man may know it, 
Who on the fair, firm land happily liveth, 
How I, sore-sorry one, upon the ice-cold sea 
Winter long dwelt midst evils of exile, 
Lorn of all joys, robbed of my kinsmen, 
Behung with icicles. Hail blew in showers ; 
There heard I naught but the streaming sea, 
The ice-cold wave ; whilom the swan's song 
Had I to pleasure me, cry of the water-hen, 
And, for men's laughter, the sea-beast's loud voice, 
The singing of gulls instead of mead-drink. 
Storms beat the stony cliffs, while the sea-swallow, 
Icy-feathered, answered ; full oft the eagle, 
Moist-feathered, shrieked." 

Here we have a full-length portrait of 
misery, with much vividness and partic- 
ularity in putting before us the monody 
of sea and sky and fate. A little farther 
on, the scald seems to imagine himself on 
land in the winter, and with the incon- 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 195 

sistency of human nature, he gets up a 
longing for the very terrors he has ex- 
pended so much energy in bemoaning : 

" The night-shades thicken, it snows from the north, 
Rime binds the land, hail falls on the earth, 
Coldest of corn. Wherefore surge now 
The thoughts of my heart, that I the high streams, 
The play of the salt waves, again might essay." 

Truth to tell, the Anglo-Saxons minded 
stiff weather on the water far less than 
we their degenerate descendants. They 
knew the sea in all her moods ; they 
lived and fought upon her, and their in- 
trustment of the dead body to her at the 
last, the death-boat pushing out into the 
open brine to float at will of wind and 
wave, is a touching proof of the magic and 
magnetism she exercised upon their mind. 

Another passage in the poem must be 
given. This time it is a brief description 
of spring, and a pleasing one : 

"The woods take on blossoms, the burgs grow fair, 
The plains are a-glitter, the world waxes gay." 

But now comes the typically Old English 
melancholy, like a death's-head at the 
feast : 



196 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" But all monisheth the heedful of death, 
To fare on a journey, he who meditateth 
Over the flood-ways far hence to go. 
So broods the cuckoo with mournful words, 
So sings the summer's ward, foretelling sorrow, 
Bitter in soul. ,, 

It is suggestive, in the face of this 
treatment of the cuckoo as a harbinger of 
woe, to compare therewith Wordsworth's 
exquisite poem to this bird : 

" O blithe new-comer ! I have heard, 
I hear thee and rejoice. 
O cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
Or but a wandering Voice ? " 

And then the closing stanza : 

" O blessed Bird ! the earth we pace 
Again appears to be 
An unsubstantial, faery place, 
That is fit home for thee." 

Here is spiritualized cheerfulness instead 
of sorry forecast, bearing out my assertion 
of the more hopeful interpretation of 
nature under the reign of Christ. 

Mention must be made of the two fine 
ballads, The Battle of Brunanburh and 
The Battle of Maldon. The former, em- 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 197 

bedded like a glowing ruby in the dull 
gray prose of the Saxon Chronicles for 
the year 937, contains a couple of bits of 
nature description, and one of them may 
be given. The theme of the ballad is 
the victory won over the Scots and North- 
men by King Athelstan and Eadmund 
the Etheling, his brother ; and the chosen 
extract is characteristically sombre and 
Old English. It deals with beast- kind, 
with the three creatures, feathered or four- 
footed, who are inevitable grim concomi- 
tants of the battle-field in the unsavory 
post-bellum capacity of scavengers. The 
mention of birds and beasts like these, 
instead of the innocent and lovesome 
song-makers who warble and chirp in 
modern verse, is another indication of the 
gloomy mood of our heathen forefathers. 
The victorious king and the Etheling, 
says the poet, sought their own homes in 
Wessex, turning their backs on the bloody 
field with its harvest of dead bodies. 

"Left they behind them, to rend the corpses, 
The sallow-coated one, the swart raven, 
The horny-nibbed and the gray-coated 
Eagle white-breasted, carrion to enjoy ; 
The greedy war hawk, and that gray beast 
The wolf in the wood." 



198 LITERARY LIKINGS 

That evil triumvirate, the raven, the hawk, 
and the wolf, fairly haunt Old English 
poetry ; and this is largely explained by 
the predominance of the theme of war's 
havoc, which naturally brings the creatures 
of prey in its train. They give occasion 
for some of the finest passages in this 
drastic vein, and, however unpleasant to 
modern aesthetics, it were foolish not to 
feel how truthful and keenly observant 
and vigorously sketched are such lines as 
these just quoted. 

The Battle of Maldon, although a much 
longer poem, contains hardly a trace 
of nature-painting, being sternly epic. 
Brunanburh is a more triumphant song 
than Chevy Chace ; Maldon^ contrariwise, 
chronicles the dire defeat of the brave 
Alderman Bryhtnoth, in Essex, in the year 
991, by the Vikings. The single example, 
again, of grim suggestion, is a brief two- 
line stroke. The fight is fierce; the 
doomed ones begin to fall, and the scav- 
engers with unseemly haste to gather : 

" Then was a cry uplift, the ravens flew about, 
The eagles, flesh-eager. " 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 199 

It remains to speak of the literary mon- 
ument which in importance, as well as in 
length, overtops all else in poetry that 
Old English days have bequeathed to us : 
I mean the Beowulf. The reader is re- 
minded that the theme of Beowulf is the 
deeds and days of the great hero by that 
name ; who visits the Danish King Hroth- 
gar ; fights, and eventually kills, the fierce 
dragon who is depopulating the great hall 
of the latter ; returns to his native land of 
Gotland, in Sweden, and rules there pros- 
perously for fifty winters as king, until he 
dies, heavy with years and honors, in a 
conflict with another dragon, and is bur- 
ied with due pomp by the seashore, and 
mourned as a good lord, — a lofty death- 
barrow being erected in his honor, with a 
bright beacon thereon, that the distant 
shipfarer may be cheered. So far as the 
treatment of nature is concerned, this poem 
is grim and gloomy in the main. We 
hear much of dusk, stony cliffs, of weird 
waterways (the supernatural comes much 
into play in the poem), of wintry moors 
and bleak earth-holes, but next to noth- 
ing of the shine and the joyance of life, ei- 
ther objective or subjective. What joyance 



200 LITERARY LIKINGS 

there is comes of battle, or of beer-drink- 
ing about the hearth-fire at night. So that 
the greatest Old English poetical produc- 
tion bears out the reiterated statement that 
it is the night side of nature which is pre- 
sented in the earliest literature. The first 
passage cited brings up a scene in the great 
hall of King Hrothgar, who is entertaining 
Beowulf, just arrived from his sea journey 
with his attendant troop. Ale and mead 
have been circulated, and one of Hroth- 
gar' s thanes, who is well drunken, twits 
Beowulf with being outdone in a famous 
swimming match in the ocean by one 
Breca. Beowulf indignantly denies this 
insinuation, and straightway tells the true 
tale of how he beat Breca. Never is the 
Old English hero backward in coming 
forward about his own deeds ; modesty, as 
we reckon it, was not one of his promi- 
nent traits. Siegfried in Wagner's operas, 
another Germanic hero, furnishes a fur- 
ther example. In the course of BeowulPs 
story we get this description of the winter 
sea. It is left to the hearer to imagine 
the icy-cold of the water and its effects on 
the hardy swimmers : 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 201 

" Then were we twain there on the sea 
Space of five nights, till the floods severed us, 
The welling waves. Coldest of weathers, 
Shadowy night, and the north wind 
Battelous shocked on us ; wild were the waters, 
And were the mere-fishes stirred up in mind. ' ' 

By mere-fishes here are meant whales, 
and the powerful statement is therefore 
made that the upheaval of the sea was 
such as to disturb even leviathan. It will 
be seen that, on the whole, this swimming 
match is accompanied by rather more seri- 
ous incidents and conducted under more 
stringent conditions than the average wager 
of its kind. Farther on in the poem, after 
Beowulf has successfully met the monster 
Grendel, and driven him, howling with 
rage at the loss of an arm, back to his 
native fen, his mother, the she-dragon, 
comes by night to avenge her son, and 
seizes one of Hrothgar's henchmen, bear- 
ing him off to feed on his body, In the 
morning the king is made aware of this 
occurrence, and on meeting Beowulf tells 
him of it, bewailing his loss. He enters 
into a detailed description of Grendel and 
his dam, his habitat, how dread the place 
is ; and calls on Beowulf for help in his 



202 LITERARY LIKINGS 

grievance and peril. During his mono- 
logue comes this picture of the lair of 
these uncanny pests : 

f * They guard a weird land, 
Holes for the wolves and windy crags, 
The fearful far ways where the mountain flood 
Under the misty nesses netherward falls, 
The flood 'neath the earth. 'Tis not far henceward 
In measure of miles that the mere standeth ; 
Thereover hang the clamorous holts, 
The woods rooted firm, o'erwatching the water. " 

The deep-mouthed, resonant tone-color 
of the vernacular gives voice well to the 
idea of the eerie aloofness and mystery of 
the place. One thinks, in reading such a 
description, of the palette of a Rembrandt 
or the word power of a Dante. Only a 
few lines farther on the picture receives a 
few additional details : 

" That is no happy spot, 
Thence the waves' mingle upward mounts ever 
Wan to the welkin, when the wind rouseth 
Storms full loath ; till the air darkens, 
The heaven weeps." 

In its elements of mournful mystery, 
its touch of magic, and its imaginative 
grouping of the terrors incident to the 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 203 

stern aspect of sea and land in the north, 
such writing may be marked as finely rep- 
resentative not only of Old English, but 
of early Germanic literature, which still 
retained Aryan features of pre-Christian 
cultus and folk-lore. 

The examples given of Beowulf fairly 
represent the prevailing manner and tone 
of the epic in treating nature ; and, as will 
have been seen from the other citations 
made, it is also typical of the general body 
of verse, whether epic or lyric, of this first 
period. I remark here in passing that 
there is not in the whole poem a reference 
to the moon, that melancholy orb of night, 
— when, a priori, we might well expect a 
poet so glum-minded to take advantage 
of it as good material to hand. But the 
sadness of the Germanic bard has not a 
touch of sentimentalizing about it ; it is 
not moon-struck moaning, but the recog- 
nition of harsh fate by heroes and warriors. 

The transition from the poetry of the 
heroic period to the monkish writings of 
such men as Caedmon and Cynewulf is 
hardly an abrupt one. The earlier vigor, 
raciness, and naivete are not wholly lost 
when we come to the later verse-making ; 



2o 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

yet certain well-defined characteristics serve 
to mark off the two products, and the 
interpretation of nature in each case is 
an earmark of the change. The most 
primitive poetry is sung by unknown 
scalds, working over and retouching the 
original from generation to generation; 
modern criticism finds this to be true of 
Beowulf as it does of Homer. But in the 
transitional time we get a definite name 
attached to the verse product, as the 
poet-cowherd Caedmon, or Cynewulf, the 
mysterious scald of Northumbria. The 
subject-matter, too, changes ; Caedmon 
making metrical paraphrases of the Old 
Testament, and Cynewulf shaping into 
narrative poems of epic dignity and scope 
the mediaeval Christian legends. Where 
before was the Germanic myth unadulter- 
ated, we meet with themes borrowed from 
the Latin ; and the older heathen fatalism, 
with its attendant mood of pessimism and 
affiliation with the darker things of the 
external world, makes way for the milder 
horoscope of the new religion, with a 
cheerier reflection of nature. The signs 
at first are somewhat chary, since the earl 
who invokes Thor cannot be smoothed 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 205 

over into the meek-hearted Christ-lover in 
a trice, — and indeed the treatment of 
religious things by these early poets often 
reminds one of the fabled wolf in sheep's 
clothing ; yet for this very reason a racy 
originality is imparted to the handling of 
themes traditionally dull and prosy, and 
the verse of religious motives has a literary 
value. 

The names of Caedmon and Cynewulf, 
the first Christian poets of the English 
tongue, are to be associated with eccle- 
siastic culture, and are of moment in the 
evolution of the native poetry. The true 
successors of the harpers whose names 
and titles are lost in the archaic twilight 
of time, they were English above all else, 
poets before they were scholars. If their 
subject-matter be largely religious, and if 
the didactic note be struck again and 
again, passage after passage can be quoted 
which rivals the heathen song in its epic 
lilt and predilection for the martial and 
heroic. The verse of such singers may 
not be overlooked by the critic in his per- 
petual still-hunt for aesthetic pleasure. 

Caedmon has been called the Saxon 
Milton. The appellation is not inapt; 



206 LITERARY LIKINGS 

the Puritan poet's possible obligation to 
his predecessor and the similarity of their 
treatment making the nexus all the more 
real ; but in regard of his origin and idio- 
syncrasy Caedmon is rather the prototype 
of a modern people-poet like Burns : the 
one summoned from the oxstall, the other 
from the plough, to tell of the things of 
the spirit ; both humble in birth and occu- 
pation, and with distinct folk-traits and 
sympathies. The Whitby poet sings in 
strong, sweet speech of the Israelitish 
quest of the Promised Land, or of such 
stirring happenings as those which centre 
around Judith as protagonist. And 
throughout his Bible-inspired epics it is 
curious to see the moody earnestness of 
the Saxon merged in the solemn, mystic- 
dreamy, or jubilant joy of the neophyte; 
this blend of character and influence 
coloring the touches of nature as it does 
other phases of the work. His verses are 
paraphrase in the broadest, freest sense. 
Whenso the singer wills, he expands, 
interpolates, introduces so much of local 
color that the composition comes to have 
independent and creative worth. 

In Caedmon' s Genesis, where God com- 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 207 

forts Abram by telling him that his seed 
shall be like the stars in heaven for num- 
ber, the bard amplifies the statement in 
this manner: 

" Behold the heavens ! Reckon their hosts, 
The stars in Ether, which now in stately wise 
Their lovesome beauty scatter afar, 
Over the broad sea brightly ashine." 

Here a distinct, new note is struck : the 
heavenly lights are considered as ema- 
nations from God, the Source of light. 
When we hear in Beowulf of " God's 
beautiful beacon/' Christian interpolation 
is at once suggested. We saw something 
of the typical treatment of animals in the 
epic : contrast therewith this tender de- 
scription of the dove sent forth to find a 
resting-place and bring tidings of terra 
firma to the sea-weary folk. The Testa- 
ment account is again laconic ; the ampli- 
fication such as to imply artistic apprecia- 
tion of opportunity : 

" Widely she flew, 
Until a gladsome rest and a fair place 
Haply she found, and set her foot upon 
The gentle tree. Blithe-mooded, she 
Joyed that, sore-weary, she now might settle 



208 LITERARY LIKINGS 

On the branch bosky, on its bright mast. 
Preening her feathers, forth she went flying 
With a sweet gift, hastened to give 
Straight in their hands a twig of olive, 
A blade of grass.' ' 

We get here the initiative of the modern 
treatment. And one notices this in an 
Old English poet for the reason that both 
Caedmon and Cynewulf can on occasion 
paint in the sober pigments of the elder 
bards. The following, for example, from 
the Exodus, reminds the student forcibly 
of the passage already given from the 
ballad of Brunanburh, and is every whit 
as savage and heathen ; it masses the 
details of a fight between Moses leading 
the Israelites and the hosts of Pharaoh : 

" In the further sky shrieked the battle-fowls 

Greedy of fight : the yellow raven, 

She dewy -feathered, over the slain-in-war, 

Wan Walkyrie. Wolves were a-howling 

A hateful even-song, weening on food, 

Pitiless beasts, full stark in murder, 

In the rear heralding a meal of doomed men, 

Shrieked these march-warders in the mid nights." 

Turning to the fragmentary Judith, the 
irrepressible relish for a sanguinary en- 
counter breaks out, and there is very little 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 209 

of the cloistral student felt in the breath- 
less lines which tell how t the Hebrew 
woman slew Holofernes. One harks back 
to Brunanburhy to Beowulf ] to such other 
Germanic monuments as the Hi/debrand, 
or to some of the Eddie poems, in reading 
it. Such literature suggests how Shake- 
speare, child of his age for all his genius, 
could heap up the murders in his plays, 
and take so kindly to the belligerent and 
the bloody. The Elizabethans were three 
hundred years nearer the Old English than 
ourselves, and the first epics of our race 
are battle-pieces, the first motif is that of 
war. But despite the redness of Judith 
as a whole, it has a peaceful close, the 
final passage celebrating nature as created 
joyously by the Maker of men ; and it 
could not have been written until after 
Augustine in the south and the Irish in 
the north had spoken of Christ to Eng- 
lish folk: 

" Be to the lief Lord 
Glory forever, He who shaped wind and lift, 
The heavens, the vast earthways, eke the wild seas 
And the sun's joys, because of His mercy.' ' 

The accent of the heathen invocation in 
such a place would be very different. 



2io LITERARY LIKINGS 

Shelley is hinted and foreshadowed in more 
than one nature apostrophe of these early 
Christian poets — Shelley minus his sub- 
jectivity. The same cosmic sweep of the 
imagination is noticeable. 

The singers picture of the Garden of 
Eden in all its primal and virgin loveliness 
shows again an appreciation of new subject- 
matter : 

"The plain of Paradise 
Stood good and gracious, filled full with gifts, 
With fruits eternal. Lovely it glittered, 
That land so mild, with waters flowing, 
With bubbling springs. Never had clouds as yet 
Over the roomy ways carried the rains 
Wan with the winds ; but decked out with blossoms 
The earth stretched away." 

In reading this verse, one is often re- 
minded of the solecisms, anachronisms, 
and amusing artlessnesses of a later liter- 
ary product which equals the younger in 
virility, the Elizabethan drama. In the 
strong, felicitous, and frequent use of the 
metaphor, also, Shakespeare and his fellows 
are leal descendants of the Old English, 
while more modern poetry has developed 
at the expense of the metaphor that ex- 
panded and weakened form of it known 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 211 

as the simile. Stopford Brooke has 
pointed out that with a poet like Caedmon, 
a Whitby man who looked forth upon the 
stormy waters of the Northumbrian coast 
while weaving his song, it was natural he 
should tell of the sea with imaginative 
vigor and felicity, as when he sang of 
Noah and the flood. Mostly, as earlier, 
it is the serious and sombre aspects which 
are depicted ; but it is worth noting that 
when we come to Cynewulf such new 
compounds as cc sea-bright " and " sea- 
calm " are made to portray the more amia- 
ble side of this moody monster. 

Caedmon's subjects are essentially epic 
and grandiosely religious ; in the case of 
Cynewulf we enter into the atmosphere 
of Middle-Age legend and worship, the 
cycle of hagiography, with an occasional 
excursus in the more primitive field, as in 
the Riddles. But by no means do the 
Old English qualities go by the board. 
If such themes as those of the Andreas 
and the Juliana suggest the studious clois- 
ter, the speech of the bard smacks of the 
soil, and there is enough of the epic and 
the folk-touch to prevent them from be- 
coming scholastic and unattractive. Ten 



212 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Brinck's remark that " the introduction of 
Christianity was doubtless one of the 
causes that destroyed the productive 
power of epic poetry," while true in the 
abstract, must not be applied with strict- 
ness to Caedmon and Cynewulf; they 
were near enough the heroic day still to 
breathe its air. In the latter' s Christy a 
loosely constructed work of a choral-epic 
nature, which celebrates the Nativity, 
Ascension, and Day of Judgment, a single 
line gives an example of the imaginative 
touch in conceiving nature as a vassal, who 
contributes her beauty to the glory of 
heaven. The seraphim who sing about the 
throne are described, and the poet chants : 

" Forever and ever, adorned with the sky. 
They worship the Wielder ; ' ' 

the Wielder being God, who wields power 
over all. The italicized clause embodies 
a conception which has a largeness re- 
minding one of the work of a Michael 
Angelo. One thinks instinctively of 
Milton's scene : 

" Where the bright seraphim in burning row 
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, 
And the cherubic host in thousand quires 
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires." 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 213 

This brief passage from the Christ is 
nobly epic and large-moving : 

" Our food He gives us and joy of goods, 
Weal o'er the wide ways and weather soft 
Under the skyey roof. The sun and moon, 
Best-born of stars, shine they for all of us, 
Candles of heaven for heroes on earth. ,, 

There is a sound of pantheism in this, 
and again comes the naive stroke in the 
epithet "heroes" where "sinners" would 
be the conventional later word. It took 
centuries of masses and missals to make 
the old Englishman admire the saint 
type more than the martial leader. Cyne- 
wulFs Andreas (now by the latest theory 
awarded to a follower rather than to 
himself) is a narrative poem which de- 
scribes the delivery of Matthew from a 
Mermedonian prison by Andrew, who 
dwells in Achaia, and who therefore has 
to make a sea journey in faring on his 
quest of rescue. It is full of sea pictures, 
and the color is that of the northeast 
coast of England, the singer's presumable 
home. In the passage following, the saint 
has been borne by angels to land, and left 
asleep on a highway near the Mermedo- 
nian city : 



2i 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" Then flew the angels, forth again faring, 

Glad on the up-way their Home to seek, 

Leaving the holy one there on the highroad, 

Sleeping right peacefully under the heaven's heed, 

Nigh to his foemen, all the night through. 

Till that the Prince suffered day's candle 

Sheerly to shine : the shades slunk away 

Wan 'neath the welkin ; then came the weather's torch, 

The brilliant heaven-light o'er the homes beaming." 

Here the thought is of light driving out 
darkness ; it would have been more in the 
way of the heathen poet to give us the 
day swallowed up in the huge black maw 
of night. In the second line translated is 
an example of the constant perplexity of 
one who essays to turn Old English into 
more modern speech. I have retained 
the word " up-way " (like the German 
Aufgang) as it stands in the original, for it 
is certainly an admirably descriptive sub- 
stantive for the airy path followed by the 
angelic messengers in flying back to 
heaven. One runs the danger of making 
either a bizarre effect or an obscure read- 
ing in such a case, the result being a fre- 
quent abandonment of the fine, strong, 
fresh Old English diction. 

But not always did Cynewulf elect re- 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 215 

ligious subjects ; the series of remarkable 
Riddles, which rank among his best pro- 
ductions, are secular in subject, heathen in 
spirit, and full of the flavor of folk-lore, 
myth, and northern melancholy. Yet 
there is a divergence from the oldest epic 
type : the writer of these puzzle-poems 
has, after all, felt the amelioration of the 
new religion, and its influence may be 
traced in the lyrico-subjective position of 
the bard toward nature. Commingling 
with the feeling for the savagery of beast- 
kind is a certain spiritual good-fellowship 
which foretokens Coleridge, Byron, and 
Wordsworth. Beside the dark, battle- 
ravenous raven we see the bright, high- 
bred falcon associated with the aristocratic 
chase and the stately king-hall. In Riddle 
Eight the swan is thus done in rapid 
crayon, for the reader's guessing : 

" Silent my feather-robe when earth I tread, 
Fly o'er the villages, venture the sea ; 
Whilom, this coat of mine and the lift lofty 
Heave me on high over the heroes' bight, 
And the wide welkin's strength beareth me up 
Over the folk ; my winged adornments 
Go whirring and humming, keen is their song 
When, freed of fetters, straightway I am 
A spirit that fareth o'er flood and field." 



216 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Riddle Fifty-eight limns a somewhat 
mysterious brown bird, the identification 
of which may perhaps be left most safely 
to Mr. Burroughs. Luckily, uncertainty 
as to name does not interfere with enjoy- 
ment of the brief, beautiful description: 

"The lift upbeareth the little wights 

Over the high hills : very black be they, 

Swart, sallow-coated. Strong in their song, 

Flockwise they fare, loud in their crying 

Flit through the woody nesses, or, whiles, the stately halls 

Of mortal men. Their own names they sound.' ' 

The hint in the final line suggests whip- 
poor-will, Bob White, and other songsters, 
but the analogy is not carried out. In 
Old English verse nothing of the lyric or 
idyllic sort is more imaginative than the 
subjoined sketch of the nightingale, in the 
ninth Riddle ; it has the interpretative 
quality removing it far from mere detail 
work : 

** Many a tongue I speak by mine own mouth, 
In descants sing, pour out my lofty notes, 
Chanting so loud, hold fast my melody, 
Stay not my word, old even-singer, 
But bring to earls bliss in their towers, 
When for the dwellers there passioned I sing ; 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 217 

Hushed in the houses sit they and hark. 

How am I hight now, who with such scenic tunes 

Zealously strive, calling to hero-men 

Many a welcome with my sweet voice ? ' ' 

We must make some requisition upon a 
long and remarkable passage from Cyne- 
wulf's allegorical poem, The Phoenix, a 
piece based upon the Latin, but much 
increased in volume and thoroughly Old 
English. The Phoenix is also an inter- 
esting example of the allegoric use of 
nature (here exemplified in the strange 
bird which names the composition) in 
the service of religious laudation. The 
bard uses a free hand in limning the 
praises of Paradise ; and, on the whole, 
the finest work of Cynewulf, and perhaps 
of Christian poetry, in the broad style, is 
embodied in the glowing and vibrant 
words and cadences. Notice the Old 
English conception of the Home of the 
Blessed as an island. The sense of this 
mid-earth as water-girdled, which is 
common to the several Germanic litera- 
tures, is blended in this case with that 
thought of England's ocean-fretted isle 
which made the greatest poet of the Ian- 



2i 8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

guage see it imaginatively as a " precious 
stone set in the silver sea." 

" Yon plain was shining, blessed with all sweets, 
With fairest fragrance the earth may yield ; 
The isle stands alone, its Artist was noble, 
Proud, rich in might, who stablished the mould. 
Oft to the Blessed Ones is bliss of songs 
Borne, and the doors of heaven opened are. 
That is a winsome wold, green are the woods, 
Roomy 'neath skies. Neither the rain nor snow, 
Nor breath of frost, nor blast of fire, 
Not the hail's drumming nor the rime's coming, 
Neither the sun's heat nor bitter cold, 
Neither the weather warm nor wintry storm, 
May harm the wights ; but the wold lasteth 
Happy and hale ; 'tis a right noble land 
Woxen with blooms. Nor fells nor mountains 
Steeply arise there ; nor do the stony cliffs 
Beetle on high, as here midst mortals. 

Still is that victor- wold, the sun-groves glitter, 
The blissful holt. Growths do not wane, 
The blades so bright ; but the trees ever 
Stand greenly forth, as God has bidden, 
The woods alike in winter and summer 
Are hung with frui tings; never may wither 
A leaf in the lift." 

The faults of such descriptive writing 
are monotony, the repetition of stock 
phrases, the working over of the same 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 219 

thought. Nevertheless, it has a noble 
manner, and a charm of diction that 
makes for true poetry. 

I hope the survey has now been wide 
enough to make the reader willing to 
believe that the treatment of nature in 
Old English poetry, in this its first mani- 
festation, is something distinct, original, 
and of high poetic value. It affords a 
welcome insight into the mind and the 
imagination of our Saxon predecessors, 
and both by what it says and leaves 
unsaid yields interesting testimony with 
regard to their attitude toward the exter- 
nal world of terror, power, and beauty. 
That attitude was vastly different from 
our own, more limited in perception, less 
enlightened, gloomier in mood, register- 
ing a state of half-development. But it 
had fine and characteristic points about 
it : the Old English imaginative vigor 
and grip, though largely sardonic ; the 
creative impulse, though vibrant to coarser 
passions and childish on the subjective 
side ; a poetic sense of the shifting gloom 
and glory of human life as voiced in 
nature or flashed forth in the bravery and 
loyalty of human kind ; a pathetic appre- 



220 LITERARY LIKINGS 

ciation of the dreams and glories of relig- 
ion ; and a power over the mother tongue 
very impressive, making it to give forth 
grave chords of harmony to grief, to echo 
the wild joy of the elements, to shrill like 
clarions in the onset of weapons, or to 
soften in the mystic melodies of worship. 
It is manly poetry, and one cannot read 
it and fail to get a bracing of the mental 
sinews, and a larger sense of the essential 
qualities of one's race in their ideal aspects 
and deeper workings. Although we may 
declare without hesitation that English 
literature is still to-day Germanic in its 
backbone and vitals, nevertheless it has 
been subjected to so much of outside and 
disparate influence that, compared with the 
literary product of the Old English time, 
it is a composite thing. Hence, in getting 
in touch with Beowulf or with some of 
the other early lyrics and ballads, we are 
going back to the originals, and are given 
a glimpse at the substructure whereupon 
is built the noble edifice of our many- 
towered and multi-ornamented literature. 
The Old English lyric (such a poem as 
The Scald's Lament or The Seafarer) is the 
corner-stone ; Tennyson and Browning, 



OLD ENGLISH POETRY 221 

Carlyle and Ruskin, Hawthorne and Long- 
fellow, Emerson and Lowell, are the lofty- 
terraces and gracious spires Which pierce 
to heaven and catch the eye with rapture 
from afar, seeming unearthly in their 
aerial splendor, their proportioned and 
thoughtful majesty. 



222 LITERARY LIKINGS 



III 

WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH 

POETRY 

* 

TN the literary history of the nations 
■*■ certain stimuli have always evoked 
imaginative expression in poetry. Cer- 
tain ideals, though the times were rude, 
and crude the degree of civilization, have 
irresistibly inspired the makers of song 
and story. Nature is one such : Nature, 
with her elemental forces, her protean 
moods, her lovely witnesses in flower, 
tree, and bird, in field and sky, in moun- 
tain height and limitless stretch of far- 
resounding sea. Such, too, is man himself 
on his heroic, his martial and mythic 
side : blazoned in war by minstrel and 
weaver of epic poem ; rich with the stories 
showing forth the valor, faith, and patriot- 
ism of humanity in a thousand perils and 
shifts of fate. Yet another such, and per- 
haps more alluring and fruitful as a motive 
than any other in the cycle of themes meet 
for the lyric and dramatic expression of all 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 223 

times and peoples, is the subject of woman 
in all the manifold and winsome connota- 
tions of the word. The eternal feminine 
has lured men on from Eden's day to our 
own. Rob literature, rob verse of this, 
and you leave them poor indeed. Col- 
onel Higginson has said that the test of a 
civilization is the estimate of women, sug- 
gesting the thought that the apotheosis of 
the sex in song is a registry of ethnic 
culture as well as of ethnic imagination. 

On the principle of beginning the story 
at home, the most ancient English literary 
product may be examined for its treatment 
of woman. So may light be thrown back 
upon the social life of the period prior to 
the Norman Conquest, and a background 
be furnished for the later and lovelier 
idealizations of the female type. Nor 
should the quest lack genuine aesthetic 
value and pleasure. 

The role of woman in Old English poe- 
try is comparatively a scant one. This 
is not to be wondered at when we con- 
sider the conditions of its creation, the 
life it represents. Feuds and internecine 
strifes claimed the main strength and inter- 
est of the Anglo-Saxons of the early Chris- 



224 LITERARY LIKINGS 

tian centuries, and following hard on these 
came the struggle to acquire a homestead 
and wrest a living from the soil. In such 
a rude and utilitarian day, sentiment, in 
the modern sense, is conspicuous by its 
absence. With the present in mind for 
contrast, one is tempted to assert, in agree- 
ment with Professor Gummere, that " there 
was a total lack of sentiment in Germanic 
life," a statement including, of course, the 
English, although farther study and reflec- 
tion suggest a modification of so sweeping 
a remark. But be that as it may, the few 
glimpses we get of woman are precious, 
and doubly interesting for their very rarity. 
At the outset we must realize that among 
the Old English a marriageable maiden 
was fought for rather than wooed, or bought 
from her parents for cash down instead of 
gracefully received of their hands. The 
surviving folk-customs of Germany and 
other European lands help to an under- 
standing of the sternly business-like nature 
of these early compacts, while the modern 
dot still preserves in the centres of our 
civilization a tang of the original unideal 
practicality. The good American custom 
of settling things with the girl herself first 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY zz 5 

and with her father afterwards would have 
met with small favor in King Alfred's time 
and before. And while the wife and 
mother had a certain value as housekeeper, 
weaver, and child-bearer, we must wait for 
those twin humanizers, the church and 
chivalry, to set a seal on woman and to 
beget a notion of the mission of the eter- 
nal feminine. Another German tribe, the 
Franks, are said to have debated in a 
church assembly whether or not a woman 
was a human being. The ideal of the sex 
as seen in the poetry, therefore, must be 
taken in relation to what was her actual 
position and character at the time, with 
no hope of the modern refinement, the 
apotheosis of the centuries. Yet here, if 
anywhere, when treating that element in 
society which in any age draws out the 
finer deeds and aspirations of men, may 
we look for a softening and sweetening of 
the typical Old English mood and mind. 
Nor, examining the literary remains, are 
we disappointed. 

Naturally it is to Beowulf, the one 
supreme epic of the Anglo-Saxon period, 
that one looks for the richest material in 
our inquiry. Half a dozen women are 



226 LITERARY LIKINGS 

mentioned in the poem, but, as is natural 
in a narrative poem whose dramatis per- 
sona are heroes, nobles, and kings, they 
are all of the queenly class. One could 
wish that other and more varied types 
were depicted, and it is for this reason 
that we shall value the too slight references 
to the sex under less lofty conditions of 
caste to be found scattered among a few 
lyrics outside of Beowulf. By far the 
most interesting of the Beowulf passages 
is that which relates to Wealtheow, the 
spouse of Hrothgar, whose hall the hero 
of the song comes to guard. She is 
painted with gusto by the bard as a stately 
lady, graciously doing the courtesies of 
her high station, at all points a pleasing 
exemplar of the house-regent and hostess 
for her royal thane. It will be well to 
translate into English blank verse the lines 
which tell of her and her service. The 
scene is in the great hall Heorot (which 
we may render as Stag Horn) wherein the 
war heroes of the king and those of Beo- 
wulf are feasting, drinking, singing, and 
laughing, in the hope that with the advent 
of the Danish Beowulf the dread of the 
dragon Grendel shall pass away. To them, 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 227 

in the midst of their heartsome revelry, 
enter the queen : 

" Forth came Queen Wealtheow, 
Of Hrothgar wife, mindful of what was meet, 
Greeting the gold- decked heroes in the hall ; 
The high-born woman gave the banquet cup 
First to the warder of the East-Dane homes, 
Bade him be blithe at drinking, he so dear 
Unto his folk ; right joyous he partook 
Of plate and beaker, battle-famous king. 
And then the Helmung's lady walked among 
The veterans and the striplings, each and all, 
Proffering the jewelled cups until it happed 
The queen ring-wreathen unto Beowulf 
Mannerly-mooded bore the mead-cup full, 
Greeted the Geat's prince and gave thanks to God 
(Wise in her words) because she had her will, 
That she might pin her faith upon an earl 
Who was an aid in evil. He, meanwhile, 
The battle-brave, received it at her hands 
And made a song, though in the weeds of war. 

The woman liked the words he spake full well, 
The boasting of the Geat ; the gold-decked one, 
The folk-queen noble, by her lord sat down." 

Certainly this is a pleasing free-hand 
description of a woman on her social and 
public side. We observe that mannerli- 
ness, savoir vivre, a carriage and etiquette 
befitting her station, were deemed goodly 



228 LITERARY LIKINGS 

things for such a person to cultivate and 
possess. Indeed, this glimpse of courtly 
life reminds one more strongly of the late 
Minnesinger period, of the chivalric fig- 
ures who make festal and alive the Nibe- 
lungen^ than of a younger and compara- 
tively barbaric day. This may be in part 
explained by the inevitable idealization of 
poetry. The picture here is selective, 
heightened from the truth. Further along 
in the epic occurs another scene in which 
Wealtheow again bears the beaker to the 
king, calls him " lord and protector," and 
bids him be generous of his gifts to Beo- 
wulf. A valuable passage for our purpose 
is that which contrasts the characters of 
the two queens, Hygd and Thrytho. The 
former, Hygd, is the wife of the Geat 
Higelac, Beowulf's king, and is drawn as 
the pattern of what a good woman should 
be in such a stead. Thrytho, contrari- 
wise, is the epitome of bad qualities, as 
seen through the lenses of the early poet, 
a sort of Lady Macbeth of the early 
Middle Ages. The passage may be 
given : 

" Right young was Hygd, 
His wife, well-natured too, despite that she 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 229 

Full few of years had bided in the burgs, 
Daughter of Hareth ; not familiar she, 
Nor yet too close of gifts to Geatish folk, 
Of costly trinkets." 

So far the bright side. It is worth 
noting that the bard commends Hygd for 
her queenly dignity, not allowing herself 
to be on too free-and-easy terms with 
those whom she outranks. He hastens 
to say, however, that she is all right in 
the main thing; namely, prodigal in dis- 
pensing her largesses of gold and gems. 
Throughout Old English literature this 
attribute is praised again and again by the 
poets, whether true of lords or ladies. 
Thus the stock phrase applied to free- 
handed earls and kings is "ring-dispenser." 
But now for the limning of the less ad- 
mirable sister queen, Thrytho, a name, by 
the way, that falls anything but trippingly 
from the tongue and seems ill-adapted to 
the music of poetry, to which the reply is 
that the elder English verse-makers cared 
little for consonantal difficulties — were 
less sensitive to musical effects than is 
the case with their modern commensals. 
This lady, then, is spouse to the Angle 
king, Offi, and appears to be lugged in 



2 3 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

solely for a foil to the virtues of the 
young Hygd : 

"Thrytho's mood was wroth, 
The haughty folk-queen, evil was her mind, 
No bold one in the trusted retinue 
Durst venture ( save her lawful lord alone ) 
To look into her eyes on any day ; 
For sorry death-chains she would lay on him 
Hand -wrought ; and soon thereafter, hand-fights o'er, 
Were weapons ready. So that hostile swords 
Must be the arbiters and murders make. 
Such is no queenly custom, nowise fit 
For lady's doing, though she peerless be, 
That she, peace-weaver, take the mortal life 
Of some dear liegeman for a fancied slight." 

How such a portrait makes us feel the 
distance of this civilization from ours ! 
What a very termagant is here revealed 
to us — a woman terrible to face, like a 
blood-thirsty animal for quarrel and kill- 
ing, ungovernable in her passions, a 
stirrer-up of tribal troubles, and alto- 
gether dreadful ! That such a wolfish dis- 
position did not seem by any means so 
awful to a contemporary as it does to us, 
is pretty sure. Women's names in gen- 
eral, from the fifth to the fourteenth cen- 
tury, throw light on this, for they are 






WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 231 

often grimly truculent; witness, Krimhild 
(Battle-mask) and Brunhild (Battle-coat) 
in the Nibelungen ; Sigrum (Battle-rime) 
in the Norse Saga ; and Hildeburg (Battle- 
town) and Beadohild (Battle-maid) in 
different Old English songs. In the 
lines just translated the beautiful epithet, 
" peace-weaver/' applied reproachfully to 
Thrytho for her lack in the suggested 
qualities, is an oft-recurring expression for 
women, especially those of high or royal 
rank. It might be inferred carelessly that 
members of the sex were regarded typically 
as white doves of gentleness in character. 
It is believed by scholars, however, that 
this sobriquet was not so subjective as 
this, but rather had reference to the fre- 
quent part played by woman when given 
in marriage between hostile tribes, peace 
being patched up thereby, to last for a 
longer or shorter time. Even with this 
explanation, a seemly part to play, even a 
beautiful, whether in the bluff days of war 
or in the piping times of peace ; the sense 
of the innate feminine gentleness is present 
plainly in the poet's remark that such-like 
behavior was neither queenly nor womanly. 
On the whole, though, we may feel assured 



232 LITERARY LIKINGS 

that the hints of savagery in such a char- 
acter as the Walkyrie Brunhild hit nearer 
the mark than a milder type like Krim- 
hild ; that Thry thos were quite as common 
as Hygds. 

The reference to Queen Hildeburg, 
consort of King Finn, of the Jutes, is 
interesting because it touches on that 
always sweet thing, mother and brother 
love. There is a feud between the Danes, 
led by Hraef, and the Jutes, and Hilde- 
burg has the misfortune to be a kins- 
woman of Hraef, who is killed in the 
conflict, Finn, too, being slain later him- 
self. So the poor queen is in a hard case, 
having her nearest and dearest on both 
sides in the quarrel, — a situation some- 
times duplicated in our American civil 
war. The bard says of her : 

" All blameless she, 
Yet in the shield-play shorn of those most lief, 
Of bairns and brothers ; wounded by the spears, 
By fate they fell — a sorry woman she." 

And a little later on is told how she 
had child and brother burned together on 
one funeral pyre, this disposition of the 
dead recalling classic scenes: 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 233 

" Then bade them Hildeburg her own dear son 
To fasten in the flames on Hraef, his pyre ; 
Wretched she wept upon his shoulder there, 
Bemoaned with wailing songs." 

That is a fine touch of mother love 
again, when Higelac, in his praise of Beo- 
wulf the deliverer, declares that it was a 
lucky woman who begot such a man : 

" Lo, whatsoever woman of the tribes 
Among mankind begot the child, if so 
She liveth yet, may soothly say, to her 
The Ancient Measurer hath gracious been 
Of son birth/ ' 

Another and a final sketch of the female 
type in Beowulf is that of Freaware, the 
winsome daughter of Hrothgar. Like to 
her mother, she is represented as playing 
Ganymede to the revellers in Stag Horn, 
the lofty hall crowned with deer antlers, 
and in her person the poet once more 
exemplifies the function of the sex in allay- 
ing bad blood and uniting warring tribes : 

" Whilom did Hrothgar' s daughter to the earls, 
To all the soldiery in order due, 
The ale-filled vessels bear. Freaware the name 
I heard her called by some. And there she gave 
The studded gems to heroes. She is plight 



234 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Young, gold-adorned, to Froda's happy son, 
The scylding's lord hath said Amen to this, 
The Kingdom's ward, and reckons it for rede 
That he through her may soothe a deal of woe, 
Of slaughterous feuds." 

But we learn in the next canto that, as 
not seldom happens, the intertribal trouble 
thus appeased by the union of Freaware 
and Ingild was renewed, when after a 
season (alas ! the inconstancy of human 
nature) the husband's wife-love had cooled 
down in the face of overwhelming cares. 

So much for woman as she gleams tran- 
siently on the canvas in the greatest of 
our Old English heroic poems. Pleasing, 
on the whole, are these portraits, showing 
her in the heartful relations of kin and 
family ; as the tactful hostess, recalling 
Chaucer's Nun, since 

" In curtesie was set full moche her leste ; " 

as one pouring oil upon the troublous 
waters of war. Here is testimony that the 
influence which has done so much for the 
refinement and amelioration of society was 
here at work, albeit under stern restric- 
tions of time and place. We may now 
supplement the Beowulfian material with 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 235 

the shreds and patches of poetic hint and 
statement to be found in minor poems of 
the primary and heathen period. 

In the earliest lyric, The Scald's La- 
ment^ one of the six strophes which com- 
pose it tells of the sad plight of one 
Beadhild, daughter of Nithad and Leman 
of Weland, the mythic smith of Germanic 
legend. Having loved not wisely but too 
well, she is left lonely to bear the burden 
of her misstep. The poet describes her 
case in this wise: 

" Her brother's death to Beadhild never sunk 
So deep in mind as did her own sore stead, 
That she perforce must know it for a truth 
How she was eaning, and could nowise tell 
What she might do." 

From this passage it may be inferred 
at least that unchastity was frowned upon 
and purity among women set store by with 
the English long before the Norman Con- 
quest. The word of Tacitus as to the 
Germans is in agreement with this idea, 
the eulogy, of course, applying as well to a 
sister tribe like the Anglo-Saxons, a later 
offshoot from the Continent. The strong 
clan and kin feeling of the Germanic 



236 LITERARY LIKINGS 

peoples was all in favor of the feminine 
virtue which in time has come to be re- 
garded as the touchstone of female excel- 
lence. A passage in the lyric Widsith 
is similar to several cited in Beowulf, 
in that it depicts a queen as gracious gold- 
giver. The Wanderer (Widsith) is the 
typical figure of the Old English scald 
travelling from land to land, attaching him- 
self to some king or over-lord, and making 
his heroic songs of the chief's prowess, to 
receive in return sure meed of gift and 
food and a vassal's privilege in hall and 
by hearthstone. But in the end the bard 
feels that his princely patron will win im- 
mortality by his lay and so get no mean 
reward in his turn, just as Shakespeare in 
his sonnet feels that he is bestowing 
enduring fame upon the boy he lauds and 
loves ; as Dante was sure he was embalm- 
ing for after ages the stately beauty of 
Beatrice. This strolling songman, now, 
has been telling how on his wanderings 
King Ermanaric, of the Goths, gave him of 
rings and money which he, faithful liege- 
man that he was, on his coming back put 
into the hands of his patron and lord, 
Eadgils, actuated by gratitude because that 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 237 

ruler had bestowed an estate upon his 
father before him, which the Wanderer in 
due course inherited. But' another land- 
holding, he goes on, was given him by 
good Queen Ealdhild, the spouse of 
Eadgils : 

" Ealdhild herself to me another gave, 

The stately queen unto the liegeman, she 

Was Edwin's daughter; praise of her was borne 

Through many lands whenso my songs were sung, 

Of how I saw her fair beneath the sky, 

The gold-adorned dispensing of her gifts." 

This again is pleasing and implies an 
attractive feudal relation. It does not 
have the hollow ring of the perfunctory 
court poetry of subsequent centuries, when 
the vices of a royal personage were chanted 
as virtues, and the pimples on his face 
apostrophized as suitable subject-matter 
for the Muse ! 

A mysterious but very suggestive poem 
is that called The Wife's Lament^ a lyric 
of fifty odd lines, in which a woman 
who seems to be exiled from her hus- 
band and is bewailing her fate pours out 
her lonesome soul in an authentically 
deep-hearted way. Grief, and the honest 



23 8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

attempt at its expression, is the same the 
world over and time on end. Even in 
the part paraphrase herewith offered some- 
what of this, I trust, may be felt : 

" Lonesome, I make this song full sorrowfully 
About my fate ; and I am fain to tell 
How I have bided grief since I was born ; 
Grief new and old, but never more than now. 

Erstwhile, my lord fared hence from midst his kin 
Over the strife of billows ; night-care then 
Was mine, to know what country might be his. 

My lord he bade me here make mine abode, 

But in this landstead I had naught of bliss, 

Of trusty friends. Wherefore my mood is sad. 

Full oft we wagered in the days agone 
That naught save death itself should sever us 
From one another. Ah, how all is changed ! 
It is as if it were not, friendship ours ! 

Full oft am I 
Grown bitter o'er the leaving of my love. 
Somewhere on earth my friends are living lief, 
They lie in beds — while I at dawn must go 
Lonely beneath my oak-tree in the clove 
And sit there all the summerlong day and weep 
My wretched woes, my many miseries. 
For that I may not rest me from my cares, 
My homesick longings which begirt my life. 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 239 

Woe to the wight that must abide her Dear 
With sad desire." 

There is little that is temporal in the 
accent of this sorrow. It is what we hear 
alike in the Song of Solomon, the Greek 
dramatists, the Elizabethan lyrics, and the 
Tennysonian Idyls of the King. It has 
the dignity and directness of an elemental 
emotion. The setting, the incidents, only 
half revealed and shadowy, are of minor 
importance. But we may notice the char- 
acteristic Germanic flavor of the lay in the 
manner in which the feeling for kin and 
home is interblent with the love of hus- 
band, furnishing a congruous background 
to the closer, keener woe. The woman 
is a " wretch " — the word signifies ety- 
mologically one exiled from the native 
land — and this thought and fact enters 
into and intensifies her misery. 

The poetry so far drawn upon has been 
heathen, pre-Christian in both theme and 
treatment. With the beginning of the 
Christian verse one would expect, natur- 
ally, a change in the depiction of woman 
under idealized literary forms ; an approx- 
imation to the modern view. The human- 
izing influence of the more gentle religion 



240 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



would tend to effect this, especially in a 
faith which elevates Mary to so lofty a 
place as co-equal with her divine Son. 
But the poetical remains are somewhat 
disappointing in this respect during the 
true Anglo-Saxon period, say up to the 
twelfth century. This is in part explained 
by the subject-matter of the epics and 
lyrics, mostly monk-made and inspired 
by biblical or hagiographical literature. 
Caedmon and Cynewulf based their work 
upon the Old Testament, or upon some 
of the many legends of the church. Hence 
either the female element is scant, or the 
types are conventional and prescribed by 
the material. Again, it needs time before 
a new religion can take deep hold of the 
imagination and display itself in literature. 
The old heathen admiration for power 
and bravery in woman rather than the 
so-called womanly qualities of modern 
civilization, breaks out now and then and 
offers an amusing illustration of the cling- 
ing to earlier, coarser ideals. The atti- 
tude toward the Virgin expressed in the 
popular line, 

" Mary mother, meek and mild/' 

so common in later mediaeval song, can- 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 241 

not be found at this time, and a woman- 
type of the Middle Ages, like Heloi'se, is 
still centuries away. The treatment of 
the sex still best relished by the singers is 
exhibited in the way a vigorous and pict- 
uresque poet seizes on the Apocryphal 
story of Judith and Holofernes and makes 
that belligerent maiden protagonist in 
scenes he thoroughly appreciates and, be 
it confessed, commends. At the same 
time, the changes from the Hebrew nar- 
rative are revelatory of the Germanic 
ideals ; Judith is converted from a wealthy 
widow into a virgin of glittering loveli- 
ness ; very beautiful, if Walkyrish in her 
battle mood. These naive transpositions 
and adaptations constitute the most inter- 
esting and subtle part of the story of the 
Old English woman creation in the early 
Christian literature. This one illustration 
may serve for the whole class in indicating 
the favorite type in this verse, although 
the new religion nominally was accepted. 
I take up the story where the heroine, 
having beheaded the heathen ruler in the 
tent scene, returns with her attendant to 
her own city, Bethalia, wearing the grisly 
trophy : 



z 4 2 LITERARY LIKINGS 

"And so had Judith speeded in the feud 

Most gloriously, as God had given her ; 

And now, wise maid, she quickly brought the head 

All bloody of the warrior in a sack, 

The which her damsel (fair-cheek girl was she 

Of gentle breeding) to the mistress dear 

Had thither fetched ; and gave it in her hand 

Wound-sodden, for to bear it home : so did 

Mistress to maid. Then swiftly sped away 

The twain, both women valorous of mind, 

Till they had left — these much enheartened ones 

Now happy — far behind the hostile host, 

And plainly saw Bethalia's winsome walls 

Shine in the sun, fair city." 

They reach the gates, are welcomed by 
the warder, enter the town, and there is 
general rejoicing at the good news which 
Judith brings : 

"And then the wise, the gold-bedecked one 
Of mindful mood, did bid them straight unroll 
The heathen war-man's head and show it for 
A sign unto the burghers, how that she 
Had prospered in the battle ; then she spoke, 
The high-born maid, unto the people all : 
' O heroes victor-famed, behold ye here, 
Ye leaders all, this loathliest of men, 
Of heathen battle kings, his head a-stare ! 
Unloving Holofernes, it is he. 
Who of all men against us most has wrought 
Of murders and sore sorrows and would eke 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 243 

Them out yet further : but God granted him 
No longer life, nor let him harass us 
With harms ; for I have overborne the Prince 
Through God, his might. Now would I call upon 
Each man of you, each dweller in the burg, 
Shield warriors, that ye, forth-soon as you may, 
Do fit you for the fight ; so soon as God 
The Maker, goodly King, doth from the east 
Send leaping light, bear out the linden shields, 
The battle-boards for bodies and for breasts, 
Keen helmets, for to fell amongst the foe 
Folk-leaders, with your gay ensanguined swords, 
The fated chiefs. Those fiends are doomed to death, 
And ye shall win the day, the glory, too, 
As God the mighty has betokened you 
Through this my hand." 

This is a ringing virile exhortation to 
arms, a cry that might have come from a 
Joan of Arc of an earlier day. Judith's 
fierce mood has in it the leaven of 
righteousness, notice. She likes war, evi- 
dently, but she loves God, and fights the 
Assyrians to His glory. Herein she 
differs from a type like Thrytho, and 
marks the sublimation to a degree of a 
primitive and strenuously earthly passion. 

I wish I might in closing give one or 
two representative selections in the lyric 
and hence, perhaps, more pleasing vein, 
but to remain within the Old English 



2 4 4, LITERARY LIKINGS 

domain, and do so, is not easy. When we 
pass into the Middle English period, lyric 
song begins with full chorus and a morn- 
ing freshness ; but that takes us beyond 
the present quest. The passages already 
adduced give a fair idea of the types and 
ideals of woman in the first and oldest 
English poetry, with its peculiar defects 
and virtues. An indefiniteness of per- 
sonal characterization or portraiture will 
have been noticed in these examples of 
the feminine role in our native song of the 
remote past. Description, minute and 
physical, of these old-time queens and 
ladies fair we have found little of; outline 
sketches they are ; pastelles, if you will, 
and the figures are almost as vague as 
those shades in Hades whom Virgil per- 
ceived to cast no shadows. Yet so much 
the more is left to the imagination, and 
remembering how long they have been 
" dust and ashes/' what a vast evolution, 
social, ethical, psychologic, lies between 
them and us, and how verily alive and 
picturesque they were indubitably in their 
day and generation, one waxes sympathetic 
toward them, after all, and drops into the 
mood of Villon's " Mais ou sont les neiges 



WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 245 

d'antan ? " One quotes in dreamy remin- 
iscence the lines wherein Browning broods 
over and bids good-by to the vanished 
ladies of another clime and time : 

" Dear dead women, with such hair too : what's be- 
come of all the gold 

Used to hang and brush their bosoms ? I feel chilly 
and grown old." 



Washington Irving' s Services to 
American History 



* WASHINGTON IRVING'S SER- 
VICES TO AMERICAN HISTORY 



WHEN a writer has won the title of 
the Father of American Literature — 
a name conventionally given to Washing- 
ton Irving — it becomes plain that he is 
very important as a figure in our native 
development in letters. His contribution 
was indeed great. With the century only 
just begun and our republic less than 
twenty years in working order, he did 
work as essayist and story-teller challeng- 
ing contrast with the best in the same 
kinds in England, and became not only a 
great American author, but a personage 
admired, lauded, and loved in European 
lands as a literary and social force of his 
day. This seems all the more noteworthy 
when we realize the adverse conditions 
under which a man of letters had to 

* Originally given as a lecture at the Old South Church, 
Bostor, in one of the historical courses conducted yearly in 
that place. 



250 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



struggle at that time. Here was a New 
York lad of middle-class Scotch-English 
parentage, reared to a business life and 
harassed for years by mercantile failure, 
lacking a classical or college education, 
and living in a city of whose deficiency in 
the amenities of art, literature, and society 
we get a clear picture in Mr. Warner's 
monograph on Irving. There was little 
there to nurse genius like Irving's. Poli- 
tics and law were the only apparent career 
for the ambitious youth. It is estimated 
that in 1822 there were not more than 
ten men of letters of repute in this land. 
Nevertheless, being of a gay, social nature 
and having as the gift of the gods the 
literary instinct and bias strongly marked 
and perseveringly developed, he was able 
to win a well-founded fame, and even at 
that early day draw the attention of the 
mother country to the United States as a 
part of the English-speaking race hence- 
forth to be reckoned with in literature. 

Irving had fewer rivals then than he 
would have had to-day — granted; other- 
wise the conditions were all against him. 
Yet we have to skip to Emerson if we 
would get a name at all Worthy to be set 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 251 

along with his as a writer. It is worth 
mentioning, in view of our special theme, 
Irving' s part in American history, that at 
the period when he began to write — in 
1807, say, the date of the Salmagundi 
papers — the impulse of the native author 
to follow English traditions in letters was 
well-nigh irresistible, infinitely stronger 
than it is at the present time. Yet Irving, 
while in works like Bracebridge Hall he is 
essentially an English essayist, in his best, 
most characteristic work used native mate- 
rial and showed himself a very American, 
and so made American literature. 

We must realize the scanty encourage- 
ment of his environment and the noble 
way he used near-at-hand, familiar, and 
hence despised material, in order to come 
to an understanding of the man, the 
writer, the historian. For it is as histo- 
rian that I would deal with him here ; 
which leads me to say that Washington 
Irving stands somewhat apart from our 
other native historians. We think of him 
primarily as a literary man, an essayist, 
story-maker, and humorist. The literary 
quality was strong, of course, in men like 
Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, but never- 



252 LITERARY LIKINGS 

theless they were first and foremost writers 
of history. Irving, despite the fact that 
he wrote several books of importance in 
that field, may almost be said to have 
written history by the way, to have been 
side-tracked into it ; or if that is putting 
it too strong, there is no danger in the 
statement that our writer will be longest 
remembered by his non-historical works 
— by genial sketches like Rip Van Winkle 
and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , and by a 
masterpiece of mock-heroic humor like 
'The History of New Tork, whose alleged 
author was that mysterious little Dutch- 
man, Diedrich Knickerbocker, a name so 
rich in connotation, so firmly embedded 
in the popular mind. And yet Washing- 
ton Irving, for the very reason that he 
was what he was, a man of letters, par 
excellence^ whose notable qualities are senti- 
ment and humor, was able to leave some 
valuable suggestions to all historians in his 
methods, and to introduce into that kind 
of writing certain characteristics that give 
it salt and savor. It is not alone books 
like his Life of Washington and his Life 
of Columbus that constitute his contribution 
to American history ; nor is the whole 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 253 

story told when we add the books on 
exotic themes, like the Alhambra, Conquest 
of Granada, and Legends of The Conquest of 
Spain, where he set an example, in a day 
when the native historian was a vara avis, 
of the adequate treatment of large inspira- 
tional themes from whatever source. No, 
those Sketch Book stories and the Knicker- 
bocker History — that sportive thing, a 
confessed jeu d' esprit — must be counted 
in as contributory and, to my mind, im- 
portant. Let me show what I mean, by 
going a little into the details of what I 
deem to be Irving's crowning virtues in 
historical composition. 

But first a preliminary remark, to the 
effect that Washington Irving must be 
judged, as indeed all men must be, in the 
setting of his time. Viewed in relation to 
current production in history or to what 
had already been done, he is seen to have 
possessed the instinct and habit of the 
true historian, the modern workman. I 
mean that he went to the sources and 
spared neither time nor labor in getting 
together his materials. Witness the years 
spent in the libraries and other repositories 
of Spain, when he was working on his 



254 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Columbus and other main books. The 
result is that, in spite of the enormous 
amount of research since expended upon 
the Italian whose name is associated with 
our country's discovery, the Irving biog- 
raphy is confessedly a standard one to-day, 
and this quite aside from its great literary . 
merits. The method of Irving, at the 
beginning of this century, is essentially 
that of the present — something quite 
different, for example, from the method of 
Jared Sparks, whose biographies were 
later in time. This consideration — Irv- 
ing's natural critical insight, as well as 
his thorough-going habits in preparation 
for historical writing — is no slight one, 
and must be counted to his credit. His 
apparent indolence in the intermittent 
periods of idleness between his works 
should mislead no one into thinking him 
a careless workman. 

But it is chiefly to the more literary 
features of the work that I wish to call 
attention, as marking Irving among our 
historians. What are they ? In the first 
place, his was a mind naturally retrospec- 
tive, loving to brood upon the past of his 
own and other countries, and sensitive to 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 255 

the romance therein to be discovered. All 
he wrote is explained in this way. He 
brooded on the Hudson, and Rip Van 
Winkle and Ichabod Crane are the result ; 
on Old New York, and the comic Dutch- 
man is evolved for all time ; on Old 
English customs and types, and Brace- 
bridge Hall springs into being ; on the 
vanished dramas, glories, and heroics of 
Spain, and the Spanish books follow in 
train. In a word, he had imagination in 
reconstructing by-gone scenes and events, 
a faculty without which the historian is 
likely to be a Dr. Dryasdust, necessary, 
useful, but unlovely. 

But right here we get into deep water 
with Irving, for certain criticisms are inev- 
itable. How can a work like the Knick- 
erbocker History be praised as history ? 
The full-length of the Dutchman therein 
drawn is not portraiture, but caricature ; 
the style is not serious, but serio-comic. 
And the worst of it is, that figure, broad of 
beam, slow of speech, surrounded with a 
fog of tobacco and much given to sleep 
and heavy eating, has been indelibly im- 
pressed upon us by the author's genius, so 
that to this day the word Dutchman, in 



256 LITERARY LIKINGS 

spite of our better knowledge, is surcharged 
with these humoristic associations. This 
may be, and is, a triumph of art and a dis- 
tinct addition to humor ; but is it not inju- 
rious to history proper, and incidentally 
hard on the Dutchman ? Professor Brander 
Matthews, for one, regrets that Irving 
should have " echoed the British scoffs at 
the Dutch/ ' though admitting that there 
was " no malice in his satire." Yet in 
closing his sketch of this author he boldly 
declares that his greatest work is the 
Knickerbocker legend. This sounds like 
a paradox, but it can be explained ; and, I 
think, without going so far as Professor 
Matthews, we may concede that the Knick- 
erbocker History is, in a broad sense, a 
contribution, if not to history, to the sym- 
pathetic appreciation of America's historic 
past — and if that be not history, it is 
hard to name it. A book that vitalizes, 
even in the way of fun, our earlier records 
and doings, that draws attention to, and 
makes interesting the types and scenes of, 
pioneer days, indirectly does good. It 
creates an atmosphere favorable to farther 
investigation. It makes a tradition of de- 
scent and keeps alive a sense of ancestry. 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 257 

Think how proudly a modern New York 
family points to Knickerbocker forbears ; 
and pride and interest in ancestry is one 
of the safeguards of self-conscious historic 
continuity. Approaching the subject with 
the bias of a poor, simple-minded literary 
man, despite the historical critics, Irving's 
chief work of humor seems to me to have 
been most fruitful for histories yet to 
come, to have fertilized the soil, making it 
genial and rich. 

And then, again, he did a great service 
in his use of native legend. What ! you 
say ; can any claim of history-making be 
awarded to stories of a village vagabond 
like Rip or goblin-haunted Yankee like 
Ichabod ? Surely such-like tales have no 
more historical foundation than the Con- 
necticut Blue Laws or the snakes in Ire- 
land. Ah, but softly ! The Hudson 
river is one of the noble and beautiful 
American streams ; but when you think of 
it, do you suppose it is no more to you 
than it was prior to the day when Irving 
gave it atmosphere ? It is quite another 
thing. Before, it was a majestic water- 
lane, more than rivalling the Rhine in 
natural beauty. Now it is that same river 



258 LITERARY LIKINGS 

seen through the mellow light of romance 
and legendry. It partakes of the glamour 
which that famed German river has for us 
by reason of its nixies, its castles, and its 
vineyards, with a story in every grape. 
Irving set the seal of the poetic imagina- 
tion upon the Hudson ; and that is a great 
thing to do for us. He gave it a back- 
ground, perspective, human interest. 
When I think of it, I see old Heinrich 
Hudson blundering up stream and expect- 
ing to find the passage to China ; Hudson, 
that seaman of renown, who " laid in 
abundance of gin and sauerkraut" and 
allowed every man " to sleep quietly at his 
post unless the wind blew;" Hudson, 
whom it is impossible not to have an af- 
fection for after you have met him with 
Rip on the mountain. He is, thanks to 
Irving, a good deal more than a mere two- 
legged peg to hang a date on. And so 
we, too, after Hudson, course up the 
river of his name, and dream of it, while 
sun or shower makes shifting lures of 
light upon the Palisades and Highlands 
and the summer storms reverberate among 
the crags of the Catskills, as the river of 
a day when wild beasts roamed the woods 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 259 

and moccasined hunters camped beside the 
waters. 

It is much to be wished that the move- 
ment which was talked of last year to 
purchase Sunnyside, Irving's historic home 
on the banks of the Hudson, and pre- 
serve it as a literary landmark, might be 
vigorously pushed to success. Nor is it 
the river's panorama alone that we see 
with the eye of imagination, optic revela- 
tion more magical than all your kineto- 
scopes and vitascopes. We behold New 
York City in the days when the Bowery 
— name that now conjures up unsavory 
thoughts of second-hand clothing and the 
unwashed of divers nations — was a green 
lane dotted with pleasant suburban resi- 
dences, each with its bower. We walk 
the grass-grown ways of Albany, where 
the cows sway home at evenfall and duti- 
fully stop before the front door for milk- 
ing, not, as the higher educated modern 
cow might do, before the town pump, for 
purposes of dilution. We get charming 
interiors of prosperous, hospitable Dutch 
country homes, which Irving drew with a fi- 
delity to detail as if in emulation of the man- 
ner of the old Dutch masters themselves; 



2 6o LITERARY LIKINGS 

homesteads nestled in a valley among high 
hills or perched upon some sightly eminence 
commanding a wide aerial sweep of blue 
water and bluer mountain — the homely, 
hearty life that teemed there and is passed 
away forever, yet not before our author 
caught its spirit and embalmed it for us in 
his books. We read with quickened 
pulses of Captain Kidd and his buried 
treasure, of the storm ship's dire warning 
to river navigators; we ride with Tom 
Walker and the Devil, and are made 
familiar with many another legend born 
of that unsophisticated age. And let us 
not forget that the author in saturating 
himself with all this folk-lore and these 
legends did yeoman service to history, 
since they are part of it, being the facts 
about the imagination of a people, quite 
as important as a register of their inner 
lives as elections are of their outer actions. 
Nor must we overlook, in thinking of the 
study he gave native themes, that he 
wrote a book called A Tour of the Prairies, 
based on his own travels, and at the time 
by far the best account of Western wild 
life in existence, but less typically expres- 
sive of the man, because others have done 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 261 

so much since in exploiting that region; 
to mention one work, Parkman's The 
Oregon Trail, came not long after. But 
this represents Irving's minor activity, 
because his writings about old New York 
life came not of knowledge gathered on a 
tourist's trip, but from the affectionate 
intimacy of a lifetime. He knew New 
York through and through, loved it, 
and so was at his happiest in telling 
of it. 

Nay, Irving not only in his works, but 
in his own person and environment, adds 
a richness to our history ; for does not his 
own Sunnyside at Tarrytown, the house 
and home he loved so dearly and came 
back to so gladly from foreign wander- 
ings, there to pass a tranquil and honored 
old age, — does not that place lend a poetic 
interest to the stream it overlooks and 
helps to make illustrious ? Yes, by his 
work and his life Washington Irving did 
his share in a subtle, but very real and 
deep sense in making America historic, in 
giving its past days light, flavor, reality, 
loveliness. This is the reason why one 
has a right to claim that Irving performed 
a service for our history in his work which 



262 LITERARY LIKINGS 

is not technically and formally included in 
his histories and biographies. 

But looking now to his work as a whole 
and inclusive of the more serious and sus- 
tained labor he put upon the Columbus 
and other like books, I remark that their 
manner, their style or literary quality, has 
an attraction not always found in even 
great historians, but wheresoever found a 
good thing. Here is the advantage of 
having a man of letters do such work. 
The result is he is readable, has interest, 
charm ; and there is no harm in the 
history writer giving pleasure — especially 
if he have thoroughness and be consci- 
entious. It may even be doubted if there 
can be much fruitful stimulation from 
history without this pleasurable interest. 
Certainly it should be furnished to young 
people beginning the study. And largely 
for that reason Irving is a capital writer 
for those who want to get a start, to 
acquire an appetite for this sort of food, 
which as set before you by some histo- 
rians will stick in your throat, or if swal- 
lowed give you an indigestion. It is a 
puzzle where Irving got his literary touch 
from. His folk were not of that sort, his 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 263 

education was desultory ; yet he has it on 
every page — an easy elegance, a flush 
of color, a music of ordered sentences. 
The style strikes us to-day as a bit old- 
fashioned, perhaps as rather rhetorical ; 
but then so will our style strike a critic 
half a century or more hence in the same 
way, as likely as not. Professor Beers, 
of Yale, quotes this passage and remarks 
that we read it with a " certain impatience ": 

"As the vine, which has long twined 
its graceful foliage about the oak and been 
lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the 
hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, 
cling round it with its caressing tendrils 
and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it 
beautifully ordered by Providence that 
woman, who is the mere dependent and 
ornament of man in his happier hours, 
should be his stay and solace when smitten 
with sudden calamity, winding herself into 
the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly 
supporting the drooping head, and bind- 
ing up the broken heart." 

Well, that smacks of the Latin in con- 
struction, is somewhat ponderous, be it 
confessed, and deliciously antiquated in its 
conception of the fair sex. Irving, a gen- 



26^ LITERARY LIKINGS 

tleman of the old school, a bachelor with 
a soft spot under his waistcoat for pretty 
and good and gracious ladies, knew noth- 
ing about the New Woman — and we 
must not blame him for that ; it was his 
misfortune, not his fault. And, again, 
this selection is not typical of him ; it 
shows old-fashioned qualities in excess of 
his habit. It were fairer to take a passage 
like the following, which is normal in its 
quiet felicity : 

"About six miles from the renowned 
city of the Manhattoes, in that sound or 
arm of the sea which passes between the 
mainland and Nassau, or Long Island, 
there is a narrow strait, where the current 
is violently compressed between shoulder- 
ing promontories and horribly perplexed 
by rocks and shoals. Being, at the best 
of times, a very violent, impetuous cur- 
rent, it takes these impediments in mighty 
dudgeon, boiling in whirlpools, brawling 
and fretting in ripples, raging and roaring 
in rapids and breakers, and, in short, in- 
dulging in all kinds of wrong-headed 
paroxysms. At such times, woe to any 
unlucky vessel that ventures within its 
clutches. This termagant humor, how- 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 265 

ever, prevails only at certain times of tide. 
At low water, for instance, it is as pacific 
a stream as you would wish to see ; but 
as the tide rises, it begins to fret ; at half- 
tide, it roars with might and main, like a 
bull bellowing for more drink ; but when 
the tide is full, it relapses into quiet and, 
for a time, sleeps as soundly as an alder- 
man after dinner. In fact, it may be com- 
pared to a quarrelsome toper, who is a 
peaceable fellow enough when he has no 
liquor at all or when he has a skinfull, but 
who when half seas over plays the very 
devil. This mighty, blustering, bullying, 
hard-drinking little strait was a place of 
great danger and perplexity to the Dutch 
navigators of ancient days — hectoring 
their tub-built barks in a most unruly 
style, whirling them about in a manner to 
make any but a Dutchman giddy, and not 
unfrequently stranding them upon rocks 
and reefs, as it did the famous squadron of 
OlofFe the Dreamer when seeking a place 
to found the city of Manhattoes. Where- 
upon, out of sheer spleen, they denomi- 
nated it Helle-gat, and solemnly gave it 
over to the devil. This appellation has 
since been aptly rendered into English by 



266 LITERARY LIKINGS 

the name of Hell-gate and into nonsense 
by the name of Hurlgate, according to 
certain foreign intruders, who neither 
understood Dutch nor English — may St. 
Nicholas confound them ! " 

His manner of writing as a whole, in its 
unobtrusive breeding and beauty, is admir- 
able, and may well be put before us as 
a model of the kind of effect it aims for. 
It is especially valuable at the present 
time for its lack of strain, its avoidance of 
violence or bizarre effects, when our later 
writers incline to hunt for startling words 
and queer constructions ; anything to ex- 
cite and seem " original. " Irving's style 
impresses one as a whole, rather than in 
particulars, — and that is the higher art. 

For another thing — Irving makes his 
work vivid by his realization of scene and 
character, which is, I should suppose, a 
literary characteristic. We have already 
seen how he did this in handling native 
material, old New York life, the Hudson 
river, and so forth. All his work illus- 
trates the quality. And with it goes 
what may be called true idealism in the 
treatment of events and men; by which I 
do not mean falsifying facts, but a broad 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 267 

comprehension of the main idea in an 
historical act or personage. Take Colum- 
bus : The danger of conceiving him is that 
he become to us a mere figurehead, a 
fleshless embodiment of the abstract no- 
tion of discovery. Every great man in 
the past runs this risk. It is the same 
with George Washington : he is a hack- 
neyed pattern-plate to the school-boy, 
or was until latter-day historians like 
McMaster began to insist on turning our 
attention away from the cherry-tree and 
toward a flesh-and-blood Virginia gentle- 
man, great, but having like passions with 
ourselves. Compare the estimates of 
Washington by Bancroft and McMaster, 
if you would see the difference, and then 
realize that it is only the latter portrait 
(the one making the Father of his Country 
alive) which you can warm up to and love. 
Now, if you will read Irving's final chapter 
in his Columbus, where he sums up the 
Italian's character, you will find it impos- 
sible not to be fired by the sketch ; it is 
vital ; the explorer is revealed as a splen- 
did figure, food for poetry, romance, 
idealization, yet not faultless, not a pale, 
mysterious piece of perfection. In a word, 



268 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Irving's method is that of sympathy, of 
love, of the historic imagination. That is 
why Mark Twain has in his Joan of Arc, 
with whatever anachronisms and lapses 
from the pattern, done something for the 
historical study of the Maid — because he 
is stimulated in imagination by her, sees 
her, loves her, realizes her greatness, and 
makes us feel it. Whoever does this per- 
forms a high function for history ; and 
beyond all peradventure Washington Irv- 
ing had this virtue in his Columbus and 
elsewhere. 

In newspaper life we speak of the re- 
porter's city article about a murder or a 
fire or a Christian Endeavor meeting — 
no matter what the subject — as a "story." 
That is the technical word to describe his 
work. It is significant. It implies the 
feeling that his report must first of all 
have graphic power, be picturesque, dra- 
matic ; that is, story-like, showing life in 
small, being an epitome of the human 
play, in some phase of it. The news- 
paper men know that the public wants 
news in this shape — piquant, warm, sen- 
sational ; and so the best reporter is he 
who can tell the best story, without de- 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 269 

parting from the facts. Sometimes and on 
some papers, I regret to say, the journalist, 
in the strain after this taking dramatic 
interest, tells a story in a double sense, and 
so journalism is brought into disrepute. 
Now, Irving, among historians, has the 
story-telling gift, in a good sense. Mr. 
Warner has pointed out that Washington 
Irving introduced the short story into Eng- 
lish ; and this talent for narration in brief 
he carries over into his long and serious 
historical compositions. This comes from 
his interest in personalities and his sense 
of the picturesque and dramatic — that 
talent which I hope I do not belittle in 
calling journalistic, for in its purity it is 
legitimate and valuable. I am willing to 
grant that sometimes this tendency led 
Irving into danger. For example, in his 
Conquest of Granada, a book where 
his literary power is at its best, he puts 
descriptions of bona fide events into the 
mouth of a fictitious cavalier chronicler, 
mingling fact and fancy in such a way as 
to give the reader a sense of unsure foot- 
ing. This certainly cannot be defended 
as a method. Yet it is very sure that 
this history gets its color and movement 



2 7 o LITERARY LIKINGS 

and picture quality in large measure from 
the author's ability to tell a story, for 
history is full of stories to tell, if the 
historian but sees them and can put them 
before us. 

Still another quality which goes to make 
Irving pleasant as well as profitable read- 
ing, and which we may call character- 
istic of the literary man rather than of the 
historian, is his humor. This is not con- 
fined to the Knickerbocker History and 
lightsome sketches like The Legend of 
Sleepy Hollow, but plays like heat 
lightning about the graver books, with a 
gentle lambency which makes them dis- 
tinctlier remembered and longer enjoyed. 
Take the same Conquest of Granada, and 
hear the closing paragraph : 

" Thus terminated the war of Granada, 
after ten years of incessant fighting, equal- 
ling (says Fray Antonio Agapida) the far- 
famed siege of Troy in duration, and 
ending like that in the capture of the city. 
Thus ended also the dominion of the 
Moors in Spain, having endured 778 
years, from the memorable defeat of 
Roderick, the- last of the Goths, on the 
banks of the Guadalete. The authentic 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 271 

Agapida is uncommonly particular in fixing 
the epoch of this event. This great triumph 
of our holy Catholic faith, according to his 
computation, took place in the beginning 
of January, in the year of our Lord 1492, 
being 2>->6$$ years from the population or 
Spain by the Patriarch Tubal, 3,797 from 
the general deluge, 5,453 from the creation 
of the world, according to Hebrew calcu- 
lation, and in the month of Rabic, in the 
897th year of the Hegira, or flight of 
Mahomet, — whom may God confound ! 
saith the pious Agapida ! " 

With this facetious marshalling of du- 
bious dates does Irving, in a mood of 
cheer perhaps begotten of the fact that 
his work was finished, take leave of the 
reader; and the mood is not unique by 
any means. The Muse of History is 
represented as a grave maiden ; it would 
be incongruous to fancy her sitting with 
backward-gazing eye, cracking jokes on 
by-gone worthies. Nevertheless, a judi- 
cious admixture of humor in history books 
now and then does have the effect of an 
oasis in the desert and draws us in the way 
of affection towards the author indulging in 
it. It is this, along with other excellences, 



272 LITERARY LIKINGS 

which makes Carlyle and Froude among 
the most stimulating, if not the most re- 
liable, of historians. 

One other quality fairly to be called 
literary I must mention — the sense of 
proportion. Irving knows how to select 
and to arrange his material, and this se- 
lective instinct gives to the result artistic 
proportion. This is one of the cardinal 
virtues in all good literature, in poem, 
story, drama, biography, history. It is 
commonly said that it is as important to 
know what to leave out as what to put in. 
To tell all we know in literature is as 
foolish as it is in life. That is just the 
difference between art and raw facts as 
presented to the artist ; from a mass of 
material he must choose, sift, arrange, and 
" compose " his picture, in the painter's 
term. It might seem that in history, 
which deals primarily with facts, with 
things that happened, there is not this 
same need of selection and suppression. 
But there is, because events are of very 
unequal importance ; and to spread out 
everything, without light and shade or 
any indication of relative values, is unin- 
spired, not to say asinine. 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 273 

In a most discerning paper on the pres- 
entation of truth in history, Prof. Wood- 
row Wilson remarks that " the facts do not 
of themselves constitute the truth. The 
truth is abstract, not concrete. It is the 
just idea, the right revelation of what 
things mean. It is evoked only by such 
arrangements and orderings of facts as 
suggest interpretations. " 

Here is a test of the good historian ; 
and I think we may claim for Irving that, 
being, as I said in the beginning, a liter- 
ary man preeminently, an artist above all 
else, he so disposes his subject-matter as to 
make an harmonious picture, duly propor- 
tioned and right in its perspective. Things 
that belong in footnotes he puts in foot- 
notes, and he does not load you down with 
unnecessary details. I may add (confiden- 
tially) that some books which you find 
heavy, slow reading, and get discouraged 
over, are not heavy because they are learned 
(learning is right and necessary to them), 
but just because they are stupid in this 
particular, the writer unimaginatively pour- 
ing out upon you an undigested mass of 
items and particulars which, unless bound 
into a symmetrical bundle and lightened 



274 LITERARY LIKINGS 

by the throwing away of useless impedi- 
menta, would break the back of an Atlas. 
Professor Wilson, in the same essay, more 
than hints that this paralysis of the sense 
of proportion is a characteristic of the 
modern school of historians. There is no 
gift more necessary to the historian than 
this of selection, of proportion. Nobody 
is likely to dispute the statement that 
Irving had it. 

The books, then, which one would natu- 
rally read in order to appreciate Irving's 
service to American history, and in which 
these traits are to be found, are, first of 
all, those dealing with what is called Knick- 
erbocker history, the story of the Dutch 
occupation of New York and sundry es- 
says and legends in The Sketch Book, Tales 
of a 'Traveller, and Bracebridge Hall, treat- 
ing phases of this life. Then, having got 
inoculated with the author, it would be 
well to take the Columbus biography, fol- 
lowing it with that of Washington. Next, 
leaving the subject-matter having to do in 
one way or the other with our own coun- 
try, rich pleasure and stimulation will be 
got out of the Spanish group : The Alham- 
bra, which will be found an Arabian Nights 



WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 275 

entertainment, the Conquest of Granada , 
and Legends of the Conquest of Spain. And 
of several biographies still unindicated, 
nobody will ever regret reading the de- 
lightfully sympathetic, happy life of Gold- 
smith, a writer between whom and Irving 
there are some marks of resemblance. 
But if one never gets any further, one 
should absorb the Knickerbocker books, 
thus getting a clear notion of the unique 
thing their maker did in creating them. 
Glancing now at the points made, we may 
claim for Washington Irving, in sundry not 
unimportant matters, qualifications of value 
to the writer in general, and to historians in 
particular : a pleasing form, the story-tell- 
ing power, historic imagination, humor, 
and the sense of proportion. He brought 
these literary gifts to the study and writing 
of history, and furnished an object-lesson 
in their use. Yet when the claim has 
been made without fear of contradiction, we 
must concede at once and frankly that our 
author, judged purely as historian, is not 
in the same class as others whose names 
suggest preeminently the writing of for- 
mal histories. His service to American 
history, as I have tried to indicate, was 



276 LITERARY LIKINGS 

distinct and large ; yet, to return to the 
key-note of the theme, Irving was not pri- 
marily the writer of history, but the man 
of letters : he chose historical subjects not 
so much because he felt the desire to por- 
tray man's historic unfolding as because he 
felt that here was picturesque material and 
material affording opportunity for serious, 
sustained work where hitherto, in sketch 
and mock-history, he had been at play 
rather than at work. But by the judgment 
of posterity, those light things he did have 
risen to the surface and continue to float ; 
they represent that by which he will long- 
est be known and loved. Hence his place 
in our literature is as secure as that of 
any writer ; and especial honors are his 
because he was a pioneer. Hence, too, 
his contribution to history was indirect, 
secondary to his contribution to belles 
lettres. The very fact that his leading 
qualities are sentiment and humor (as his 
best critics decide) would make this inevi- 
table ; for sentiment and humor, though 
valuable, are not the first requisites of the 
history writer. But these considerations 
need not belittle Irving' s right to be stud- 
ied and lauded in a review of the Ameri- 



WASHINGTON IRVING' S SERVICES 277 

can historians. If not one of the great, 
he is one of the most winning and sugges- 
tive, figures in the group ; an artist, where 
art is often lacking ; a genial lover of his 
kind, where cold impersonality is a danger ; 
a weaver of romance and the magic of the 
imagination over the early days and doings 
of his own people, who have been not 
seldom depicted in the rawness and harsh 
realities of their actual conditions. Would 
that all historians had, like him, illustrated 
in their works the use and value of the 
literary touch and the creative mind. 



Battle Laureate : Henry Howard 
Brownell 



A BATTLE LAUREATE : HENRY 
HOWARD BROWNELL 

¥ 

i 

HEINE has said in his beautiful way 
that the lyric poet, like the nightin- 
gale, never grows old, but sings as surely 
as the spring returns. In a sense this is 
true, yet it is also true that the note of 
poetry, whether lyric or other, is heard with 
peculiar sympathy at the occasion of its 
birth, and sounds less sweet with the pass- 
ing of the years, the incoming of other 
interests and fashions. While great liter- 
ature knows no time nor country, each 
age needs and gets its representative songs 
and stories, the new crowding out the old. 
" The experience of each new age," says 
Emerson, " requires a new confession, and 
the world seems always waiting for its poet." 
Especially is this so when the song is in- 
spired by some event like our Civil War. 
That great conflict begot some notable 



282 LITERARY LIKINGS 

American literature, though less than so 
gigantic a cataclysm, so legitimate and 
home-made a motif ] so high-principled a 
cause, might be expected to bring forth. 
Yet what was born of it falls to-day on 
less responsive ears. Only the very 
greatest poetry is independent of time- 
values and of local justification. 

Hence it happens that the verse of a 
Connecticut singer, Henry Howard 
Brownell, not yet a quarter century dead, 
is seldom heard upon the mouths of men, 
albeit more genuine song in its kind was 
not written in the red years of 1861-65, 
nor perhaps did any thrill the popular 
heart more electrically at the moment. 
His slender volume of War Lyrics in its 
faded cover, taken down from the dim 
shelf where it is gathering that dust which 
alike for books and men chokes their most 
resounding deeds, greets the eye half 
reproachfully, as if in comment on the 
changeful humors of the world. Yet is 
this he whom Dr. Holmes called " our 
battle laureate," and who at this later day, 
and judged by his contribution to art, 
surely deserves a place among the native 
poets who hymned the shame, the pathos, 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 283 

the terror and the glory of the Great 
Conflict. 

Brownell was born in Providence, 
R.I., but moved at such an early age 
to East Hartford, the village lying on 
the eastern shore of the Connecticut op- 
posite Hartford, that he may be claimed 
fairly by the State which takes its name 
from that beautiful and storied New Eng- 
land stream. Hartford folk are wont to 
regard him as their own, like New Yorkers 
in the case of George William Curtis, 
though he, too, first saw the light in Prov- 
idence. Brownell's stock was of the best 
New England can show. His father was 
a most respected physician, his mother a 
De Wolfe of Rhode Island, a woman of 
culture and breeding, while the name 
of his uncle, Bishop Brownell, is honor- 
ably associated with Trinity College, the 
poet's Alma Mater. After being graduated, 
he taught school for a year in Mobile, 
Ala., and then returned to Hartford and 
engaged in the study of law. But he 
belonged to that goodly company of men 
who, having the instinct for letters, are 
really unfaithful to the Green Bag — it was 
a profession which he never followed with 



284 LITERARY LIKINGS 

much steadiness or zest. Delicate of 
health, possessed of means enough to make 
him independent of the res angusta domi, his 
life became chiefly one of quiet study and 
leisurely travel. The verse he wrote prior 
to the war is a reflex of such tastes and 
environment. But with the firing on 
Fort Sumter came an electric change in his 
life and hence in his song. The poem 
General Orders, n rhymed version of 
Farragut's orders to the fleet, drew the 
Admiral's attention, and put him in corre- 
spondence with the writer. Mr. Brownell 
confessing he should like to witness a sea 
engagement, Farragut appointed him act- 
ing ensign on his own ship, the Hartford, 
and made him his private secretary. The 
bard of battle was thus placed in an excep- 
tional position for the truthful limning 
of what he beheld. Here was a " sea 
change " indeed ! — from the scholarly, 
almost recluse life in the suburban hamlet 
to the awful scenic tragedy of naval war- 
fare. 

He was in several of the notable later 
encounters which made Farragut's a name 
to conjure with — among others, that 
Bay Fight which evoked one of his most 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 285 

ringing and unforgetable fulminations. 
Half a score of his finest things were 
written on and dated from the Hartford, 
giving one a sharp sense of their reality 
and urgence. Here was no student's echo 
of the strife, but the clash and flash of 
war itself, writ red in blood and booming 
with big guns and the cry of victor or 
vanquished ; while as a setting to the stern 
picture, nay, interfused with the human 
action, is the swash and swell of the mighty 
and many-mooded ocean, her whims re- 
spondent to the alternate calm and plan- 
gent stress of civil strife. 

Beholding Brownell at this juncture, 
one thinks of Beranger, now in prison, 
now on the Paris streets hobnobbing with 
the republican leaders, while his fiery songs 
stir up the insurgent mob ; or of Korner 
pouring out " Vater, Ich rufe dich " and 
those other lyrics which are watchwords to 
the German heart, as he died upon a bat- 
tle-field of the War of Liberation. The 
song work of such men offers startling, 
beautiful witness to the close comradeship 
of life and literature. As Dr. Holmes 
has it, the poems so written " are to draw- 
ing-room battle poems as the torn flags of 



286 LITERARY LIKINGS 

our victorious fleets to the stately ensigns 
that dressed those fleets while in harbor." 
After the peace was won, the war- 
knit friendship between the Admiral and 
Brownell led to the latter' s being recom- 
missioned, and as a member of the staff 
accompanying the great naval officer on 
his European trip. ' He met in this way 
the dignitaries of the earth, and had ex- 
periences which, with some men, would 
have found artistic expression in poetry 
or other literary form. Not so with this 
singer. His was the uncompromising 
love of liberty, the shy New England 
aloofness, and he carried his convictions 
with him, refusing on one occasion, it is 
said, an introduction to Louis Napoleon 
and the Sultan of Turkey. His chief 
inspiration, the real cause for singing, was 
over ; and on his return to his native 
shores, he was for the few remaining 
years mostly silent — one or two poems 
of occasion, notably that at the reunion of 
Army and Navy at Newport in 1 87 1 , when 
he eulogized Farragut in commemorative 
verse, being the exception. His life there- 
after was one of dignified, scholarly retire- 
ment ; he was a much-respected, unob- 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 287 

trusive figure, persona grata in Hartford's 
social circles whensoever he saw fit to cross 
the river and mingle among his friends and 
kinsmen. A confirmed bachelor, he resided 
with his mother at the family home. In 
1 871 cancer of the cheek developed, and 
after more than a year of intense suffer- 
ing, borne as befitted one whose coolness 
under fire had been commented upon by 
his fellows aboard the Hartford, the final 
release came, and in his fifty-third year 
Henry Howard Brownell had fought his 
last fight. He lies in the East Hartford 
cemetery, and has the Connecticut in 
sight, in times of freshet almost within 
hearing. The Admiral could not be at 
his funeral, having preceded him ; but 
Mrs. Farragut and her son were there, 
and their flowers sweetened the place and 
ceremony. The Brownell homestead, by 
one of those unpicturesque lapses of fate, is 
at present the hotel of the village. 

Among the portraits of worthies which 
adorn the walls of the editorial rooms of 
the Hartford Courant is a half-length of 
Brownell in uniform, an excellent like- 
ness, and one seldom seen. It presents 
the poet in middle age — a refined, strong, 



288 LITERARY LIKINGS 

grave face, bearded to the lips, with fine 
brow and a head whose thinning hair 
brings out the clearer the marked devel- 
opment in the region of the perceptive 
faculties. Brownell was of middle stature 
and spare habit, well built and of a digni- 
fied, graceful carriage ; the whole personal 
impression of him was, by all accounts, 
one of quiet power, of courteous, self- 
respecting manhood. Unconventional, 
even careless in his dress, shunning public 
occasions, he was not a showy man, but 
was of the sort who stand well the test of 
close acquaintance. 

In spite of his retired and simple life 
after the war, I find myself thinking of 
him first of all as a naval officer, a chanter 
of battles. In the picture gallery of the 
Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford there 
hangs a large and spirited canvas by 
William H. Overend, the English ar- 
tist, depicting the engagement at Mobile 
between the Hdrtford and the Tennessee. 
On the hurricane deck are grouped the 
officers of the former ship, all of them 
good portraits. Farragut, an heroic fig- 
ure, is in the rigging hard by, and near 
him stands Brownell, leaning eagerly for- 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 289 

ward as he watches the fight, and fully 
exposed to the storm of shot and shell, 
holding in one hand a piece of paper — 
perhaps the notes for The Bay Fight, 
some stanzas of which were actually writ- 
ten on the spot. It is in such a setting 
that this man is fitliest remembered. 

II 

Brownell's verse in the main originated 
as " newspaper poetry " — a fact sug- 
gesting the remark that not a little Am- 
erican literature has had a like democratic 
birth. In the columns of the Hartford 
Courant and other Connecticut sheets ap- 
peared some of his most brilliant work. 
It was gathered into books, too ; for 
Brownell published in all four volumes of 
verse in the course of the twenty years 
between 1847 an d 1866; but his distinc- 
tive work, that upon which his fame must 
rest, is to be found in the War Lyrics, 
which appeared one year after the close 
of the Rebellion. This contains the best 
of his earlier verse and that inspired 
directly by the events of the war — the 
lyrics and ode-like narratives written hot 
from the heart, currente calamo, amidst the 



290 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



scenes they picture. Their very lack of 
polish, their artistic imperfections, testify 
not more to this genesis than does their 
potency of inspiration. The previous 
volumes, while denoting the culture of 
their maker, his graceful gift of rhyme 
and measure and his literary tastes, can- 
not be called markedly individual. 
Had Brownell done no more he would 
have furnished some pleasant enough 
reading for a day less critical than our 
own, but made small claim upon one who 
seeks to estimate American poetry of per- 
manent interest. One feels in his ante- 
bellum song the influence of Bryant and 
Poe, of Whittier and Longfellow, and 
finds little else ; his writing is imitative in 
manner and slight in substance. But in 
the War Lyrics' (n few pieces from which 
were to be found in the Lyrics of a Day, 
dating two years before) are some twenty 
poems which may be characterized as car- 
mina bellorum, veritable children of the war, 
presenting this singer's authentic contribu- 
tion to his art and to his country. The 
balance of this final book, although con- 
taining several striking and artistic things, 
can be overlooked in the far greater sig- 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 291 

nificance and worth of the work born of 
a deeper impulse. The characteristics 
that mark the finest of it — such poems 
as The Bay Fight, Annus Memorabilis, 
Down, and ^he Battle Summers — are vivid 
descriptions, a felicitous diction often 
rising to genuine beauty, even grandeur, 
and the born balladist's breathless rush of 
incident. 

In fact, to call Brownell a lyric poet 
without qualification is misleading. He 
was above all else a writer of ballads, who 
believed in his theme, had a story to tell, 
and sang because emotionally vibrant. 
The ethical quality is strong, and the 
poetry is frankly, bitterly partisan : he 
saw no good in the foe, and such epithets 
as "the black flag" and "traitor sword" 
are hurled like hammers of Thor at his 
devoted head. Yet he has a true soldier's 
sense of bravery even in an evil cause. 

"The sheen of its ill renown, 

All tarnished with guilt and shame, 

No poet indeed may crown, 
No lay may laurel a name," 

he sings, but adds : 



2 9 2 LITERARY LIKINGS 

(f Yet never for thee, fair song, 

The fallen brave to condemn ; 
They died for a mighty wrong, 

But their Pemon died with them.*' 

One hardly looks for the judicial tone, 
eminently proper to the historian now, 
in a man making poems on the flag-ship 
before the blood of the beloved has been 
washed from the decks. Brownell's bias 
(to give it the word cool analysis suggests 
to-day) helped rather than harmed the 
quality of his verse. Poetry is of the 
heart, not the head, and the singer, like 
the reformer, must see but the side he 
champions and hymns. 

There is in Brownell's work, again, a 
keen sense of the rough-and-ready camar- 
aderie of the bivouac and the forecastle, 
showing at times in a grim humor, but 
oftener (since he was so dead in earnest) 
in the realistic, homely phrase, the strong 
Saxon speech of him, the unconventional 
rhymes and irregular stanzas, the drastic 
touches which a nicer, more self-conscious 
muse had not allowed herself. Here 
Brownell becomes unliterary in that he is 
direct, careless, and natural, not reflective. 
This is not to gainsay that his poetry 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 293 

would have gained by condensation. It 
is diffuse not seldom, just as Whittier's is ; 
the critic can put finger on stanzas much 
below the poet's standard, and occasionally 
quite unworthy of him. Yet it may be 
that the impression of vital reality would 
have suffered had excision and trimming 
taken place. 

There are near to ninety stanzas in 
The Bay Fight L , and thq idea of unity and 
force would have been better conserved 
doubtless were the song-story briefer ; as 
in the physical world, heat and light must 
have followed compression. On the other 
hand, in reading that production, the 
thought is so organically related, and the 
feeling so cumulatively strong and unin- 
termittent, that it is puzzling to say just 
where pruning were well. 

We may look in detail at The Bay 
Fight as one of the poet's representative 
longer pieces ; it opens the volume, and is 
deemed his most popular poem. Its 
theme is Farragut's attack on the forts at 
Mobile Harbor on Aug. 5, 1864. The 
first stanza is a fine one : 



294 



LITERARY LIKINGS 



" Three days through sapphire seas we sailed ; 
The steady Trade blew strong and free, 
The Northern Light his banners paled, 
The Ocean Stream our channels wet. 
We rounded low Canaveral's lee 
And passed the isles of emerald set 
In Blue Bahama's turquoise sea " 

— the dominant s alliteration furnishing 
just the right tone-color for the scene. 
Then follow ten stanzas in simpler four- 
line ballad measure, telling with much 
picturesqueness of phrase and heightening 
of interest of the suspense before the 
hidden batteries opened on the ships. 
But the moment came : 

"A weary time — but to the strong 
The day at last, as ever, came ; 

And the volcano, laid so long, 

Leaped forth in thunder and in flame." 

Then with startling suddenness, to mark 
the change in situation, language, metre, 
everything is transformed : 

" * Man your starboard battery,' 
Kimberly shouted. 
The ship, with hearts of oak, 
Was going, mid roar and smoke, 
On to victory! 
None of us doubted, 
No, not our dying — 
Farragut's flag was flying ! " 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 295 

And for many strophes the whole expres- 
sion and movement is terse, rapid, intense, 
the lilt being so cunningly made up of min- 
gled trochees and dactyls as to convey 
an idea of the rush and drama of the 
action. The poet apostrophizes the ships 
as personalities ; you feel he loves them 
as live things a-quiver with the conflict: 

"Sixty flags and three 

As we floated up the bay ; 
Every peak and mast-head flew 
The brave Red, White, and Blue : 

We were eighteen ships that day." 

As he hears the shock of the rebel 
guns, the lust of fight gets into his blood, 
and this stirring stanza is thrown off" by 
way of retaliation : 

"Ah, how poor the prate 
Of statute and state 
We once held with these fellows. 
Here on the flood's pale green 
Hark how he bellows, 
Each bluff" old sea-Lawyer ! 
Talk to them, Dahlgren, 
Parrot, and Sawyer!" 

Down went Craven and his ships in the 
drawing of a breath. 



296 LITERARY LIKINGS 

"Then, in that deadly track, 

A little the ships held back, 

Closing up their stations. 

There are minutes that fix the fate 

Of battles and of nations 

(Christening the generations), 

When valor were all too late 

If a moment's doubt were harbored. 

From the main-top bold and brief 

Came the word of our grand old Chief, 

' Go on ! ' — ' twas all he said. 

Our helm was put to starboard, 

And the Hartford passed ahead.' ' 

Through a hell of fire they pushed on 
but the enemy's shell made havoc. 

" But, ah, the pluck of the crew ! 
Had you stood on that deck of ours, 
You had seen what men may do." 

Even the regiments on shore forgot to 
fire as they looked on at the awful spec- 
tacle. Describing the carnage, he gives an 
example of his grim realism : 

"Dreadful gobbet and shred 
That a minute ago were men " 

— which recalls to me a terrible touch of 
Kipling's in The Light that Failed, where 
the slain on that Soudan battle-field are 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 297 

pictured, and the narrator says he had 
never "seen men in bulk gone back to 
their beginnings before." But bravery 
matched destruction. 

"And ever, with steady con, 

The ships forged slowly by, 
And ever the crew fought on, 

And their cheers rang loud and high. 

"Grand was the sight to see 
How by their guns they stood, 
Right in front of our dead, 
Fighting square abreast, — 
Each brawny arm and chest 
All spotted with black and red 
Chrism of fire and blood ! 

"Fear ? A forgotten form ! 

Death ? A dream of the eyes ! 
We were atoms in God's great storm 

That roared through the angry skies.' ' 

And now the enemy turned and fled, 
and then — 

"So up the Bay we ran, 
The flag to port and ahead ; 

And a pitying rain began 

To wash the lips of our dead ' ' 

— this last image as impressive as anything 
in The Ancient Mariner. 



298 LITERARY LIKINGS 

But now, again, the deadly ram steamed 
up the harbor, and the day is yet to win. 
Farragut gave orders to run him down. 

"We stood on the deck together, 
Men that had looked on death 

In battle and stormy weather, 
Yet a little we held our breath, 
When, with the hush of death, 

The great ships drew together " 

— a superlatively splendid strophe, stat- 
ing with all the force of indirection the 
fearsomeness of the collision. Then with 
impetuous verve we hear of the mistake 
whereby the Union vessels, the Hartford 
and Lackawanna, collided, and — 

" The old ship is gone — ah, no, 
But cut to the water's edge." 



Gradually, however, the ram is ringed 
in by the northern fleet and plied with 
shot and shell, until — 



" Down went the traitor Blue, 
And up went the captive White," 

and these noble, pathetic lines follow 






A BATTLE LAUREATE 299 

"Up went the White! Ah, then 
The hurrahs that once and again 
Rang from three thousand men 

All flushed and savage with fight ! 
Our dead lay cold and stark, 
But our dying, down in the dark, 
Answered as best they might, 

Lifting their poor lost arms, 
And cheering for God and Right.' ' 

But the poet consoles his grief over the 
slain by a consideration of what the victory- 
means : 

" One daring leap in the dark, 

Three mortal hours at the most, — 

And hell lies stiff and stark 

On a hundred leagues of coast.' ' 

Then come some beautiful stanzas, a 
dirge for the dead Craven, reminiscent of 
Tennyson a little in spirit and rhythm ; 
and the poem closes in a quieter lyric vein 
prophetic of the time of peace after the 
necessary strife, and surcharged with per- 
sonal devotion to the cause: 

"To-day the Dahlgren and the drum 
Are dread Apostles of his Name ; 

His Kingdom here can only come 
By chrism of blood and flame. 



3 oo LITERARY LIKINGS 

"Be strong: already slants the gold 
Athwart these wild and stormy skies ; 

From out this blackened waste, behold, 
What happy homes shall rise ! 



" Nor shalt thou want one willing breath, 
Though, ever smiling round the brave, 

The blue sea bear us on to death, 
The green were one wide grave.* ' 

It is quite impossible to read this pro- 
duction without a quickened pulse ; it is 
one of the most honest and inevitable 
utterances ever put into ballad form or 
ode-like measures. It is a picture, an 
action, and the experience of a soul, all in 
one ; and almost all of it is poetry of a 
rare, difficult, and inspirational kind. 

Taking it for all in all, — sustained 
power, freedom yet artistic beauty of form, 
glow of feeling, imaginative uplift and fre- 
quent inspiration of word, phrase, and 
passage, — The Bay Fight is Brownell's 
most representative and memorable piece 
of work, an epic performance. 

But he did much else in different keys, 
though all rounding out the one Song of 
the Flag. There is Annus Memorabilis, 
brief clarion call to arms, when Congress 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 301 

in 1860-61 hesitated to take the step, and 
the poet declares: 

" 'Tis coming, with the boom of Khamsin or 
Simoom, ' ' 

and with figures and in a spirit of Miltonic 
austerity and grandeur foretold the down- 
fall of the " Serpent and his Crew." This 
is a lyric which, when Senator Hawley read 
it in his Hartford editorial office, brought 
him to his feet in a trice, all afire with its 
power and passion, — Brownell as a poet 
being to him at the time an unknown 
quantity. There too is The Battle Summers 
(dated 1863), a perfect lyric, pensively 
reflective, quiet, noble in its musing upon 
the past and future, a dream 

"Of many a waning battle day 

O'er many a field of loss or fame ; 
How Shiloh's eve to ashes turned, 
And how Manassas' sunset burned 
Incarnadine of blood and flame." 

In the same vein, a lovely example of 
his more introspective mood, A War 
Study is short enough to give in its 
entirety : 



3 o2 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" Methinks all idly and too well 

We love this nature — little care 
(Whate'er her children brave and bear) 
Were hers, though any grief befell. 

" With gayer sunshine still she seeks • 

To gild our trouble, so 'twould seem ; 
Through all this long tremendous dream 
A tear hath never wet her cheeks. 

"And such a scene I call to mind : 

The third day's thunder (fort and fleet 
And the great guns beneath our feet) 
Was dying, and a warm gulf wind 

" Made monotone mid stays and shrouds. 
O'er books and men in quiet chat 
With the Great Admiral I sat, 
Watching the lovely cannon-clouds. 

" For still, from mortar and from gun 
Or short-fused shell that burst aloft, 
Outsprung a rose-wreath, bright and soft, 
Tinged with the redly setting sun. 

" And I their beauty praised, but he, 

The grand old Senior, strong and mild, 
Of head a sage, in heart a child, 
Sighed for the wreck that still must be." 

Down is a thrilling, lurid thing, and 
Suspiria Ensis is virile, fairly leonine in 
some of its strophes. Sumter is again a 






A BATTLE LAUREATE 303 

trumpet blast, with all the elan of a cavalry 
charge in it : 

"Sight o'er the trunnion, 

Send home the rammer, 

Linstock and hammer ! 
Speak for the Union 

Tones that won't stammer ! 

" Men of Columbia, 

Leal hearts from Annan, 

Brave lads of Shannon ! 
We are all one to-day — 

On with the cannon ! ' ' 

For personal characterization, the long 
poem, Abraham Lincoln, which appeared 
originally in the Atlantic, and which in 
some of its lines and its felicity of limning 
the " first American '' is of the same stock 
as Lowell's peerless ode, once read will 
not be forgotten. Length for length, it is 
fittest mate to 'The Bay Fight. My illus- 
trative quotations may be brought to a 
close with a few borrowings from it and 
a brief comment upon its contents. It 
begins with a description of the peace and 
beauty of Nature, who, after her manner, 
has covered up and smoothed over the 
unsightly signs of war : 



304 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" The roar and ravage were vain ; 

And Nature, that never yields, 
Is busy with sun and rain 
At her old sweet work again 

On the lonely battle-fields. 

" How the tall white daisies grow 
Where the grim artillery rolled ! 

Was it only a moon ago ? 
It seems a century old.'* 

But the sad human minor strain creeps 
in : 

" And the bee hums in the clover, 
As the pleasant June comes on ; 

Ay, the wars are all over — 
But our good Father is gone. 

" There was thunder of mine and gun, 

Cheering by mast and tent, 
When, his dread work all done 
And his high fame full-won, 

Died the Good President." 

Then comes a succession of burning 
stanzas in which the inexplicable dastard 
deed and the doer are scored without 
mercy ; and then follows one of the finest 
selections in the whole hundred and odd 
strophes — that in which Lincoln is char- 
acterized : 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 305 

" Kindly Spirit ! Ah, when did treason 
Bid such a generous nature cease, 

Mild by temper and strong by reason, 
But ever leaning to love and peace ? 

" How much he cared for the State, 

How little for praise or pelf ! 
A man too simply great 

To scheme for his proper self. 

" But in mirth that strong head rested 

From its strife with the false and violent — 

A jester ! So Henry jested ; 
So jested William the Silent." 

But he is well mourned, says the poet ; 
since the world began, he declares in 
noble hyperbole, none " ever was mourned 
like thee." 

" Dost thou feel it, O noble Heart 
(So grieved and so wronged below), 
From the rest wherein thou art ? 
Do they see it, those patient eyes ? 
Is there heed in the happy skies 
For tokens of world-wide woe ? ,J 

This land and other lands join, he goes 
on, in the lamentation, and stately are the 
signs and tokens thereof; but there is 
homely grief, thus pathetically set forth : 



306 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" Nor alone the State's Eclipse ; 

But how tears in hard eyes gather, 
And on rough and bearded lips 
Of the regiments and the ships : 

* Oh, our dear Father ! ' 

" And methinks of all the million 

That looked on the dark dead face 
'Neath its sable-plumed pavilion, 

The crone of a humbler race 
Is saddest of all to think on, 

And the old swart lips that said, ' 
Sobbing, ' Abraham Lincoln ! 

Oh, he is dead, he is dead I 9 " 

The technician of verse will not fail to. 
notice here the daring use of a feminine 
double rhyme, dedicate traditionally to 
the comic mood, in a passage of tender- 
est solemnity. 

Next comes a fine, broadly sketched 
picture of a review of the home-coming 
soldiers : 

" And all day, mile on mile, 
With cheer and waving and smile, 
The war-worn legions defile 
Where the nation's noblest stand." 

For a few stanzas the tone is exultant ; 
then the minor thought once more : 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 307 

" And our boys had fondly thought 

To-day, in marching by, 
From the ground so dearly bought 
And the field so bravely fought, 

To have met their Father's eye. 

(< But they may not see him in place, 
Nor their ranks be seen of him ; 

We look for the well-known face, 
And the splendor is strangely dim." 

But after all, chants the singer, he is in 
a better country, with his comrades around 
him. 

" For the pleasant season found him 
Guarded by faithful hands 
In the fairest of summer lands; 
With his own brave staff around him, 
There our President stands. 

" There they are all by his side, 

The noble hearts and true 

That did all men might do, 
Then slept, with their swords, and died." 

Some twenty following stanzas name 
and describe Lincoln's even-Christians — 
Winthrop, Porter, Jackson, John Brown, 
and the rest — with him on the thither 
bank of the stream. And not the leaders 
alone, but the led, the nameless heroes of 
the rank. 



3 o8 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" And lo, from a thousand fields, 
From all the old battle-haunts, 

A greater Army than Sherman wields, 
A grander Review than Grant's ! 

f( Gathered home from the grave, 

Risen from sun and rain, 
Rescued from wind and wave 

Out of the stormy main, 
The legions of our brave 

Are all in their lines again !" 

In the course of the succeeding stanzas 
he rises to these superb lines : 

" But the old wounds are all healed, 
And the dungeoned limbs are free ; 

The Blue Frocks rise from the field, 
The Blue Jackets out of the sea. 

"They've 'scaped from the torture-den, 
They've broken the bloody sod, 

They've all come to life again, 

The third of a million men 

That died for thee and for God ! " 



The poem ends grandly with the final 
touches to this apocalyptical vision of the 
spirit review : 



"The colors ripple o'erhead, 

The drums roll up to the sky, 
And with martial time and tread 






A BATTLE LAUREATE 309 

The regiments all pass by, 
The ranks of our faithful dead 
Meeting their President's eye. 

"With a soldier's quiet pride 

They smile o'er the perished pain, 
For their anguish was not in vain — 

For thee, O Father, we died ! 
And we did not die in vain. 

" March on your last brave mile ! 

Salute him, Star and Lace, 
Form round him, rank and file, 

And look on the kind, rough face. 
But the quaint and homely smile 

Has a glory and a grace 
It never had known erewhile, 

Never, in time and space. 

" Close round him, hearts of pride ! 
Press near him, side by side. 

Our Father is not alone ! 
For the Holy Right ye died, 
And Christ, the Crucified, 

Waits to welcome His own." 

Ill 

In the bead-roll of the makers of liter- 
ature whom by birth or adoption the 
State of Connecticut may claim as her 
own, Henry Howard Brownell should 
have a sure and honored place. The list 



310 LITERARY LIKINGS 

is neither short nor insignificant: Mrs. 
Sigourney, Percival, and Halleck, in the 
earlier century, Stedman, Warner, Clem- 
ens, Bushnell, and Mrs. Stowe, in later 
days, are a few of the names that spring 
to the mind. But in all the divisions of 
letters naught is rarer than the true poet; 
and such an one is to be recognized in 
Brownell, recognized not only by the 
partial eye of local pride, but also by 
the colder scrutiny of critical opinion at 
a time when the first magnetism of the 
singer's theme begins to lose its magic. 
His was not impeccable verse ; lines that 
limp and figures that fail are by no means 
absent from his writing. But he had a 
great subject, it took hold on him, and he 
was consecrate to it ; his were thought, 
elevation, invention, imagination, and an 
almost unique opportunity for realism, in 
the right meaning of that poor, distorted 
word. And, withal, he was a truth-loving, 
high-minded, fearless gentleman. As a 
result, he has left a slender sheath of 
lyrics which so faithfully transcribe certain 
aspects of the Civil War, and are so vital 
with its atmosphere and feeling, that it is 
hard to see how they will miss of a lodg- 



A BATTLE LAUREATE 311 

ment in the native anthology. Certainly no 
one else has so well performed just this ser- 
vice. There rings through his song that 
love of country which makes the Horatian 
quotation, " Duke et decorum est pro p atria 
mori" one of the hackneyed lines of Latin 
poetry. In his most largely conceived 
pieces one associates him instinctively (at 
least in spirit and quality) with the very 
few native singers — Emerson, Lowell, 
Whitman, Lanier — who have chanted 
national issues with elevation and adequate 
voice. 

Mr. Stedman, who calls Brownell " that 
brave, free singer," points out with his 
customary keen perception the " half- 
likeness " of the poet to Ticknor, " sound- 
ing the war-cry of the South." They are, 
in sooth, kinsmen : each was born a poet ; 
each saw his cause to be holy ; and each 
grew impassioned and impressive with the 
burden of his utterance. And we, a gen- 
eration later (since there is no sectionalism 
in genius), can love the song and the spirit 
of them both, burying their difference of 
belief under the tranquillizing years, while 
we drop upon their far-separated graves the 
memorial flowers of a united patriotism. 



The Renaissance in English 



THE RENAISSANCE IN 
ENGLISH 

¥ 

TO say that the English language, es- 
pecially in its literary uses, has within 
the second half of this century experienced 
a veritable renaissance may seem to be 
making a stiff claim. Yet there is much 
to justify so strong a term and statement, 
to explain and illustrate which is the busi- 
ness of this paper. The original impulse 
has come from the specialists, who have 
devoted themselves to the study of Old 
English, to the language and literature 
lying back of the Norman Conquest. The 
past thirty years have witnessed a wide 
popularizing of the earlier native literary 
treasures through their efforts ; the princi- 
pal texts have been edited and translated 
and lectured about, and their use in schools 
and colleges encouraged, so that now the 
graduate from one of our leading and lib- 
erally endowed institutions may, if he 
choose, know his Beowulf as his father did 



3 i6 LITERARY LIKINGS 

his Horace. These elder classics of the 
mother tongue have not only been taken 
into the curricula of instruction, but have 
been put forth for broader literary appre- 
ciation, with the idea of literary stimula- 
tion as well as linguistic drill. Then, too, 
the comparative study of the allied litera- 
tures — the output of the Germanic group 
of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian peo- 
ples, of which English is a kinsman — has 
done its share in shedding light upon our 
tongue as an organism governed by lin- 
guistic laws and possessing powers long 
unsuspected. 

To this cultivation of Old English (at 
first the province of the few, but rapidly 
becoming the work and pleasure of the 
many) may be added the closer study and 
appreciation of later literary figures and 
epochs, — Chaucer and the Elizabethans 
and Spenser, to say nothing of Shakespeare 
himself, — together with the marked at- 
tention, reaching almost to the dignity of 
a cult, directed toward the historical Eng- 
lish ballad; and last, but by no means 
least, the increased sensitiveness to the 
literary quality of the Bible. To antici- 
pate no effect, sooner or later, upon native 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 317 

modern literature, from all the exploitation 
of the older fields, — allowed, so many of 
them, to lie fallow for a long period, — is 
to overlook cause and effect in the devel- 
opmental interrelations of speech and let- 
ters. Nothing could be further from the 
truth than to suppose this movement to 
be a matter of mere literary fashion : it 
goes far deeper than that. The return to 
Old English expression (always, of course, 
within limits of common sense and con- 
trolled by custom and convenience) is 
not a temporary fad, but will prove a per- 
manent enrichment of the force and splen- 
dor of the speech. The preference for 
native words and idioms has grown so 
marked that it can be recognized plainly 
in some of our most effective and power- 
ful writers, while signs of it crop out con- 
stantly in current literature. One who for 
the first time turns, for example, to the 
poetry of William Morris will find it 
something not only rich, but strange, 
— and for this very reason. 

One of the principal things taught by 
this restoration of English to much of its 
old-time valiancy is the tongue's Germanic 
structure : that primitive ability in word- 



318 LITERARY LIKINGS 

forms and sentence-construction which the 
German, its historic cousin, has retained in 
larger measure. The student of English, 
in tracing back its line of development, 
becomes aware that it converges steadily 
toward this other tongue ; so that when 
the Old English period is reached the in- 
vestigator is astonished to see how close, 
compared with the present status of the 
two languages, is the affiliation with Ger- 
man, in words, forms, and idioms. So 
true is this that the student is told that a 
first requisite for any fruitful pursuance of 
historic English is the learning of German. 
But the latter, owing to its different his- 
tory, has kept its native powers in relative 
purity ; while English, subjected to more 
disturbing influences in the Norman Con- 
quest and the classic Renaissance, has di- 
verged far wider from its normal physiog- 
nomy and its original tendencies. As a 
result of such divergence, where the Ger- 
man uses a native compound like vorwort, 
the English turns to the Latin and makes 
preface ; where English domesticates such 
a repulsive foreign importation as massacre, 
the German uses blutbad (blood-bath), a 
native formation self-explanatory to the 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 319 

most illiterate of the race ; and so on with 
hundreds — even thousands — of other 
words concerning which it is to be said that 
had our own tongue encountered a happier 
linguistic experience it would, quite as read- 
ily as its sister-language, have clung to its 
birthright and privilege in this respect — 
word-forming from within, and so keeping 
the speech pure. And even to-day much 
(though not all) of this power can be re- 
claimed, and a realization thereof is bring- 
ing it about. Thus, it is not infrequent 
now that a book by a scholar bears the 
legend " foreword" instead of the custom- 
ary " preface ;" here is plainly enough the 
effort to reinstate, by analogy with the Ger- 
man, what might have been very properly 
the distinctive word from the beginning. 
To those who have not looked into the 
matter such a seeming neologism may ap- 
pear a bit of pedantry, an affectation with 
no significance ; but it is not so, for the 
great principle of English renascent in ac- 
cordance with its organic spirit lies behind 
such a case. As these older words creep 
into the diction of the scholar aware of the 
historical facts we have indicated, or are 
used by the literary worker keenly alive 



3 2o LITERARY LIKINGS 

to the strength and fitness of these speech 
heirlooms, we may be sure that the ten- 
dency is wholesome and one to gather force 
in the time to come. For it is a return to 
the simple and the indigenous, an eschew- 
ing of the foreign, which has been overlaid 
like a lacquer upon the native material. 
Of course many of our foreign-derived 
words have become so thoroughly angli- 
cized as to make it impossible, no less 
than unadvisable, to eradicate them. But 
the method proposed is not the rooting 
up of what is firmly planted in the speech, 
but a reintroduction, a calling back of the 
germane, thereby ousting slowly, unvio- 
lently, what is less suitable. It will be, 
and should be, a case of the survival of 
the fittest. 

The movement once started by the 
philologists and specialists in language has 
been, it may be repeated, carried on with 
vigor by those who make literature. It is 
in their efforts that the popular rehabilita- 
tion of the older and purer elements of 
English especially may be found. And in 
this welcome influence poetry rather than 
prose will always be dominant. It is of 
the nature and essence of poetical diction 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 321 

to be archaic, to show a large proportion 
of native words, and this because it is the 
language of the emotions, which always 
chooses the homespun and the familiar 
terms and forms natal in the speech. 
Words like home, mother, father, love, 
heart, and hearth — the category of the 
affections — will in all tongues be recog- 
nized as born within its body. And this 
contribution of poetry, the highest form 
of literature, to our linguistic treasure- 
trove will be supplemented inevitably by 
the most imaginative prose-writing, since 
the same law is there at work : the indig- 
enous element strong when the feelings 
are in considerable measure implicated, the 
imagination widest awake. A great service 
is being rendered by the present accepta- 
bility of dialect literature : through the 
attention in fiction to the local " speech- 
islands," as philologians dub them, the 
dialectical variations of the common stock 
of language are brought into notice, and a 
multitude of words, idioms, and phrases 
reinstated in the parlance, or at least in 
the cognizance, of the more sophisticated 
centres of speech. And since the linguis- 
tic survivals of the country-side are more 



3 22 LITERARY LIKINGS 

often than not the local persistence of 
what was once the best English for culti- 
vated and literary usage, the result is a 
constant enrichment of the modern word- 
hoard. The counties or colonies of Great 
Britain, the manifold sections of the 
United States, have in this way yielded 
up rich treasures to the skilful hands of 
the poets and novelists. Never has the 
local speech been transcribed with a like 
faithfulness, skill, and attraction. From 
this cause the tongue will in time become 
an instrument of wider diapason, more 
varied in its harmonies, and vibrant with 
immemorial racial tones. The reader to- 
day gets a new sense of its possibilities, 
and is taught hospitably to throw open the 
doors to fresh material representing local 
survivals of the sturdy old speech which, 
by the good graces of literature, then be- 
come revivals of our current language. 

With this outline sketch of principles, 
some illustrations, drawn from the various 
channels of contribution, will make the 
contention plainer and should prove not 
uninteresting. Let us take a passage from 
Dr. Hall's metrical version of Beowulf as 
an example of the sort of English used 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 323 

by a student who essays to present such a 
monument in a modern dress 5 yet preserves 
as much as may be its primitive tang : 

" Fast the days fleeted ; the float was a-water, 
The craft by the cliff. Clomb to the prow then 
Well-equipped warriors ; the wave-currents twisted 
The sea on the sand ; soldiers then carried 
On the breast of the vessel bright-shining jewels, 
Handsome war-armor ; heroes out-shoved then, 
Warmen the wood-ship, on its wished-for adventure. 
The foamy-necked floater, fanned by the breeze, 
Likest a bird, glided the waters.' ' 

To bring such language into popular con- 
sideration is educative and may be counted 
upon for its influence ; the archaic words 
or forms can readily be picked out ; found 
in the vernacular, they are allowed to re- 
main in the translation ; and it is the test 
of the happy translator how close he clings 
to the original without growing obscure or 
offensively odd. 

Dr. Furnival, the doughty president 
of the English Shakespeare Society, is a 
scholar whose studies might be expected 
to affect his diction, as indeed they have. 
In his introduction to an edition of Will- 
iam Harrison's A Description of England, 
this wielder of forthright English speaks 



324 LITERARY LIKINGS 

of an "unthrift young gentleman," and 
his description of Harrison as a personal- 
ity reads thus : 

A business-like, God-fearing, truth-seeking, 
learned, kind-hearted, and humorous fellow, he 
seems to me ; a good gardener ; an antiquarian 
and numismatist ; a true lover of his country ; a 
hater of shams, lazy lubbers, and evil-doers ; a 
man that one likes to shake hands with across 
the rift of two hundred years that separates us. 

The effect of this upon the reader is of 
a style plain, familiar, and racy ; but the 
more it be studied in extenso the clearer is 
it seen that its quality is due to a bias for 
the older words and constructions — a 
characteristic of Dr. Furnival's manner of 
writing in general. 

Among modern historians none is so 
remarkable for the Saxon simplicity of his 
style as Freeman; he carries his prefer- 
ence for the vernacular so far that at times 
he will repeat the same native word again 
and again within a few lines rather than 
use its classic or romance equivalent — 
with an effect of baldness and sameness in 
his diction. It is not surprising that this 
great historian's burrowing in the past of 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 325 

England and English should have left its 
mark on his prose ; the following passage, 
from the first lecture in The English 
People in its 'Three Homes, brings the point 
home : 

Here on your soil I am not indeed in mine 
own home, but I am none the less among mine 
own folk. I am among men of mine own 
blood and mine own tongue, sharers in all that 
a man of either England deems it his pride and 
happiness to share in. How can we be strangers 
and foreigners to one another, how can we be 
other than kinsfolk and brethren of the same 
hearth, when we think that your forefathers and 
mine may have sailed together from the oldest 
England of all in the keels of Hengest or of 
Cerdic — that they may have lurked together 
with iElfred in the marshes of Athelney — that 
they may have stood side by side in the thick 
shield-wall on the hill of Senlac — that they 
may have marched together as brethren to live 
and die for English freedom alike on the field 
of overthrow at Evesham and on the field of 
victory at Naseby? 

Here, again, I am aware, the general 
physiognomy of style is that of a homely, 
strong simplicity, having, however, an 
eloquence all its own ; here, it might be 



326 LITERARY LIKINGS 

said, is no revamping of the tongue, but 
only a straightforward manipulation of 
English unadorned. Yet such a style is 
an exceedingly rare phenomenon ; it may 
be stated boldly that an example of it 
thirty years ago cannot be found in Eng- 
lish. Only from one who had drunk 
deep draughts from the purest sources of 
our speech could such felicitous handling 
of its Germanic powers have come. Mr. 
Freeman, in the book quoted from, bears 
down on our close relationship to the 
Germans and Dutch, respectively second 
and first cousins. Speaking of the " tie " 
which binds the English of the British 
isles to that ancient England of the conti- 
nent whence they came, he acknowledges 
that it may not be at first evident, and 
" does not force itself upon the mind by 
the most obvious witness of language, of 
history, of all that makes divided brethren 
to be brethren still. But the tie is still 
real ; it is still living." He is thinking 
here of other things than language, but 
his words apply thereto in full force. 

Other modern historians, whose style is 
strong on the native side, — men like 
Green and Froude and Harrison, — fur- 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 327 

nish examples, though not in so striking 
a degree as Freeman, of the influence 
upon personal diction of delvings in the 
bygone life and language. A glance at 
some modern poets may be taken, to 
strengthen the impression ; and no man 
may fitlier head the list than William 
Morris, whose verse, as already hinted, is 
notable in this matter of good old English. 
I draw on his great story-cycle, The 
Earthly Paradise, a stanza from The Man 
born to be King: 

st So long he rode he drew anigh 

A mill upon the river's brim 

That seemed a goodly place to him ; 

For o'er the oily, smooth millhead 

There hung the apples growing red, 

And many an ancient apple-tree 

Within the orchard could he see, 

While the smooth millwalls white and black 

Shook to the great wheel's measured clack 

And grumble of the gear within ; 

While o'er the roof that dulled that din 

The doves sat crooning half the day, 

And round the half-cut stack of hay 

The sparrows fluttered twittering." 

We have chosen this earlier unobtrusive 
example of a happy use of the native 
English elements in verse rather than one 



328 LITERARY LIKINGS 

from the later, more pronouncedly archaic 
— and to some artificially Germanic — work 
of Morris, though this richly illustrates 
the principle. This natural trouvere may 
be called a pioneer of the linguistic renais- 
sance when it is remembered that the 
chief poem-group of his life dates from 
1868—70. And with him may properly 
be set Swinburne ; he too exhibits in his 
verse, in his diction and metres as well, 
the strong influence upon him of the root- 
flavors of speech, though in his case a 
softer, more voluptuous effect is gained 
by the intermingling of classic elements. 
Take these stanzas of his magnificent 
paean, The Armada, and see how well- 
nigh every word of it is home-born and 
monosyllabic — a fact making its rhythmic 
flow all the more wonderful and its force 
the more potent : 

" Greed and fraud, unabashed, unawed, may strive to 

sting thee at heel in vain ; 
Craft and fear and mistrust may leer and mourn and 

murmur and plead and plain : 
Thou art thou ; and thy sunbright brow is hers that 

blasted the strength of Spain. 

" Mother, mother beloved, none other could claim in 
place of thee England's place ; 






THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 329 

Earth bears none that beholds the sun so pure of 

record, so clothed with grace ; 
Dear our mother, nor son nor brother is thine as 

strong or as fair of face. 

« How shalt thou be abased ? or how shall fear take 

hold of thy heart ? of thine, 
England, maiden immortal, laden with charge of life 

and with hopes divine ? 
Earth shall wither, when eyes turned hither behold 

not light in her darkness shine. 

"England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by 

grace of thy glory, free, 
Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to 

serve as he worships thee ; 
None may sing thee : the sea-wind's wing beats down 

our songs as it hails the sea." 

Mr. Stedman speaks of Morris as showing 
how well " our Saxon English is adapted 
for the transmission of the Homeric 
spirit; " a fair characterization also of 
much of Swinburne's lyric and dramatic 
writing. 

Compared with these men in their typi- 
cal manner, the poetry of the great earlier 
men — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and 
Shelley — shows a startling difference in 
regard of the relative prominence of native 
English words and formations. They had 



330 LITERARY LIKINGS 

not the advantage of the popularization 
of younger literature which has since tran- 
spired. And the latter-day bards, the 
generation subsequent to the Morris-Swin- 
burne time, reveal this influence more and 
more, just in proportion as they are virile 
and awake to larger possibilities for melody 
and harmony now open to English. 

Of American singers Sidney Lanier is 
unique in his sensitiveness to Old English 
language and literature, coloring all his 
work and giving it a distinctive stamp. 
The fine couplet — 

"By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the 

sod, 
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God " 

— is representative of his style ; and this 
stanza of the Ballad of Trees and the 
Master stands, in its Saxon directness, for 
much more : 

" Into the woods my Master went, 

Clean forespent, forespent. 

Into the woods my Master came, 

Forespent with love and shame. 

But the olives they were not blind to Him, 

The little gray leaves were kind to Him ; 

The thorn-tree had a mind to Him 

When into the woods He came." 






THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 331 

Stevenson too, and Kipling, whether as 
poets or prosers, are of this goodly com- 
pany ; the very title of the former 's Under- 
woods is eloquent of these older speech 
memories, while in that lyric repository is 
the perfect Requiem with its now renewed 
pathos, each several word of which is Eng- 
lish unadulterated, with the one exception 
of the word verse : 

"Requiem. 

" Under the wide and starry sky, 
Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will. 

" This be the verse you grave for me : 
Here he lies where he longed to be ; 
Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill.'*'* 

Kipling also, among those enchanting 
provocative interludes of rhyme which are 
to be found in his prose books, has this 
bit which clings to the native side of the 
mother-tongue in a fashion typical of this 
virile young maker of measures and spin- 
ner of yarns : 



332 LITERARY LIKINGS 

" Oh, was I born of womankind, and did I play- 
alone ? 

For I have dreamed of playmates twain that bit me to 
the bone. 

And did I break the barley bread and steep it in the 
tyre ? 

For I have dreamed of a youngling kid new riven 
from the byre, 

An hour it lacks and an hour it lacks to the rising of 
the moon ; 

But I can see the black roof-beams as plain as it were 



Nor is this bent for pure English con- 
fined to the " chiels " of the rising gener- 
ation : it is symptomatic, and the open- 
eyed reader meets with it on all sides. In 
a poem by Graham R. Tomson occurs the 
line — 

"And all her talk was of some out land rare " 

— a direct parallelism with the German 
ausland. In Bliss Carman's fine Steven- 
son threnody, A Sea-mark, there are half 
a dozen signs of this desire or instinct — 
which comes to the same thing — for 
resuscitating latent powers to the freshen- 
ing and beautifying of latter-day vocabu- 
lary and construction. Thus : 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 333 

" But I have wander-biddings now ; " 

" You brethren of the light-heart guild, 
The mystic fellow craft of joy ; " 

" A valiant earth ling stark and dumb ; " 

"The journey-wonder on his face ; " 

" Heart-high, outbound for otherwhere ; ' ' 

— the italics indicating phrasing which 
shows this promising American verseman 
to have learned the time's lesson in lin- 
guistics. 

And prose literature, notably fiction, 
adds richly to the evidential material, dia- 
lect (as explained) being a main source of 
contribution. Again Stevenson and Kip- 
ling are in the van. In Dr. Jekyll and 
Mr. Hyde ^ the story which first drew pop- 
ular attention to one who had long before 
revealed to the judicious an artist's hand, 
may be found half a dozen places which 
illustrate the tendency to fall back upon 
the ancient privileges of a tongue of which 
he was past-master : as where " a sharp 
intake of the breath " is spoken of. Some 
of the matchless descriptive writing in The 
Ebb-tide affords occasion for more or less 
in the same sort, as here ; 



334 LITERARY LIKINGS 

There was little or no morning bank. A 
brightening came in the east; then a wash of 
some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between 
crimson and silver ; and then coals of fire. 
These glimmered awhile on the sea-line and 
seemed to brighten and darken and spread out ; 
and still the night and the stars reigned undis- 
turbed. It was as though a spark should catch 
and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy 
and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the 
room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, 
and the whole east glowed with gold and scarlet, 
and the hollow of heaven was filled with the day- 
light. 

Here there is the magic blending of native 
and imported elements to make a truly 
admirable style; but ever and anon (as 
in the italicized closing words) Stevenson 
places before the ravished observer a com- 
pound or turn of expression or sentence 
which has a relish of old time and the 
sanction of bygone generations. 

Kipling, too, is cunning in the same 
fashion, allowing, of course, for the per- 
sonal equation. Take the following from 
A Matter of Fact, one of his most grew- 
somely imaginative tales : 

As he spoke, the fog was blown into shreds, 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 335 

and we saw the sea, gray with mud, rolling on 
every side of us and empty of all life. Then in 
one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of 
ointment that the Bible speaks of. From that 
wide-ringed trouble a Thing came up — a gray 
and red Thing with a neck — a Thing that bel- 
lowed and writhed in pain. 

The illustrations from current fiction- 
makers who have turned dialect to literary 
uses is legion, and an embarrassment of 
riches the result ; examples are hardly 
necessary, so obvious is this aspect of the 
movement. In Raymond's delightful 
Somersetshire idyl, Tryphena in Love, we 
find, " And to-year she was meeting with 
wonderful good luck " — the remark be- 
ing the author's own, not a part of the 
dialogue. "To-year survives in dialectical 
service (like countless other words), and is 
common enough in the Elizabethan drama- 
tists and further back ; it may be seen that, 
by analogy with to-day and to-morrow, it is 
a capital formation, a regrettable loss to 
modern English. Mr. Raymond, in the 
preface to his volume of short stories, 
Love and Quiet Life, speaks of this locu- 
tion, and adds : " And what is the dis- 
tinguishing initial vowel of the past-partic- 



336 LITERARY LIKINGS 

iple of the rustic but a heritage from our 
Saxon [he means Old English] ancestors? " 
— going on to point out the resemblance 
between the countryman's prefix, a, in a- 
wanty and the Germany in gewandt. Ever 
and again the German comparison forces 
itself on the student. In Justin H. Mc- 
Carthy's pleasing novel, A Woman of 
Impulse (which may be read as the antidote 
to Dodo), I find him speaking of " a ballad 
with the overword " — also a strictly Ger- 
manic compound. 

It is hardly necessary to illustrate from 
the Scotch word-work of Barrie, Crockett, 
and their commensals, since, of all the 
dialect loosely grouped under the conven- 
ient name " Scotch," it may be declared 
that it is strongly conservative northern 
English ; that is a fair description, histori- 
cally, of the variations in English to the 
north of the Firth. Scotch proper, it may 
be added, is Celtic — quite another thing. 
But the more conventional speech of these 
two writers, as well as of others like Quiller 
Couch and Hardy and Blackmore, fur- 
nishes food for our thesis. Here, for ex- 
ample, are the very opening sentences of 
Barrie* s A Window in Thrums : 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 337 

On the bump of green round which the brae 
twists, at the top of the brae and within cry of 
T'nowhead Farm, still stands a one-story house, 
whose whitewashed walls, streaked with the dis- 
coloration that rain leaves, look yellow when the 
snow comes. In the old days the stiff ascent 
left Thrums behind, and where is now the mak- 
ing of a suburb was only a poor row of dwell- 
ings and a manse, with Hendry's cot to watch 
the brae. 

Quiet, unforced English, this ; but when 
you come to compare it with that of an 
immediate earlier generation, it is not hard 
to notice the change. Or read this from 
Nora Hopper's strangely poetic Ballads in 
Prose, where the influence is Celtic of the 
Irish order, and the stylistic model Mal- 
ory's Morte a" Arthur : 

And when next Cuchullin woke from his 
dreams he found that Ineen still held him fast, 
though she was dead and cold ; and with some 
difficulty he loosed her hands from him, and 
dug with his sword a grave for her in the sand, 
and there he laid her sorrowfully, praying Angus, 
the Master of Love, to keep her soul in his 
Golden House, and Manannan MacLir to hold 
his waves aloof from her sleeping-place. And 
when he visited the place with Eimer, after a year 



338 LITERARY LIKINGS 

and a day, they found that the sea had fallen back 
for half a league, and that the place where the sea- 
girl slept was a broad space of grass, and in the 
midst of the grass rose white spikes of meadow- 
sweet, the flower which for the sake of a forgot- 
ten love and a forgotten sacrifice is called of us 
to-day Crios Chuchulainn (Cuchullin's Belt). 

That in the movement here-above 
sketched certain influences have been long 
at work has been conceded frankly, and 
those influences named. Nevertheless, 
that a strong added impulsion has come 
from the popularization of Old English 
language and literature, signs of which are 
easy to be seen, is a plain matter to the 
student and lover of his native speech. 
Sometimes it shows in the literary regen- 
eration of a word which for centuries has 
lain perdu ; sometimes through the intro- 
duction of an idiom out of strict analogy 
with the German ; again by the elevation 
of dialect to a more urbane place in the 
tongue ; most often by a widespread ten- 
dency toward monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon. 
But, whatever the manifestations, all hark 
back to a common cause, stand for one 
phenomenon ; and it may be affirmed of 
the younger writers, whether using the 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 339 

grand old mother-tongue in America, in 
England, or in any one of the great colo- 
nies where she is at home, those we are 
coming to look upon as torch-bearers are 
the best exemplars of this hopeful charac- 
teristic, it being, in sooth, one reason of 
their strength and place in the forefront. 
A point to be borne down upon is the dif- 
ference between this movement and sundry 
fashions in the language of literature and 
life which have their little day from time 
to time in various countries. Such was 
the Elizabethan Euphuism, the Spanish 
Gongorism, the Marianism of Italy, the 
Schwulstigkeit of the Germans, the Parisian 
preciosity ridiculed by Moliere. A com- 
mon hall-mark of all these is affectation ; 
they have a narrow aloofness, are super- 
ficial and temporary, averse from what is 
genuinely natural and national, whereas 
the return to the older in English is — 
allowing for the occasional posing and 
strained effects of those whose province it 
is to bring discredit on any tendency good 
in itself — a going back to what is simple, 
strong, direct, and vital to our speech 
instincts. 

This renaissance of English, then, silent 



34© LITERARY LIKINGS 

but steady, for the most part unsensa- 
tional, but none the less potent, is to be 
apperceived to-day, and in the twentieth 
century will be more apparent. And the 
very fact that our leading writers wish thus 
to turn back to native uses and things is, 
so far as it goes, proof of the race's health, - 
of its solidarity and esprit de corps. We 
may take comfort in it when confronting 
an alarmist like Nordau, for a general 
degeneration of the speech would follow 
any general degeneration of literature ; 
and the testimony of language, just now, 
directs us to opposite and more cheerful 
conclusions. 



American English 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 

I 

THE thorough study of English, as 
language and as literature, which, 
during the last generation, has been pros- 
ecuted with zeal in several countries, has 
blown away the mists in various direc- 
tions and let in the sunlight of truth upon 
many questions historical, philological, 
and aesthetic. One result of the work done 
has been to put us in a position to esti- 
mate at their true value ignorant or shal- 
low criticisms on the particular form of 
English spoken in this country — British 
strictures often, but sometimes emanating 
from native writers who aped the former, 
and lacked all sound knowledge of the 
subject. Thanks to the fact that both the 
language and literature of our race are now 
known in their genesis and their historic 
development, the matter of the relation 
and comparative importance of the vari- 
ous forms of the English mother-tongue, 



344 LITERARY LIKINGS 

spoken in the different countries where 
that speech is at home, can be pronounced 
upon to-day with intelligence and a good 
degree of certitude. And it is high time 
some general canons of criticism should be 
made popular ; for a woful amount of 
misconception and nebulous thinking is 
to be noted among people of brains and 
culture. In truth, questions of language- 
use in general appear to offer a premium 
for guesswork and opinion without any 
logic back of it. One man is as good as 
another when it comes to philology, is too 
often the assumption in society. The 
two commonest methods of settling dis- 
putes when the matter of words comes up 
is by an appeal to a dictionary — and 
more likely than not to one which should 
not be taken as a final authority — or, 
worse yet, by the complacent remark that 
So-and-So is right in London ; ergo, it is 
right for the United States of America. 
There are, however, a few principles which 
can be and ought to be set up as a guide 
to save us from the thoughtlessness or the 
ignorance implied in such attempts to get 
at the truth. Sounder views, to be sure, 
are not unique : Mr. Brander Matthews, 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 345 

for example, in his belligerently patriotic 
paper on Americanisms and Briticisms y sets 
forth with a lively wit the fact that honors 
are easy in the matter of good speech here 
and over seas, and so introduces the idea 
of independence to the self-respecting 
native. But Mr. Matthews makes no 
effort to formulate the principles under- 
lying his position, and based on literary 
and linguistic history ; hence his paper, 
stimulating and healthy in tone as it is, 
can hardly be named as a court of appeal. 
In the present essay a method of criticism 
is suggested and a few tests applied which, 
it is hoped, may prove helpful to others 
who are interested in the subject, but not 
sure of their footing. 

In the past the typical British attitude 
toward American English has been that of 
patronizing superiority and shallow incom- 
petence ; nor is this state of things su- 
perseded altogether at the present time. 
Plenty of Englishmen when they hear our 
familiar use of the word guess smile at 
it as a Yankee barbarism, blissfully uncon- 
scious that it is in the highest literary 
usage of the fourteenth century and com- 
monly employed by both Wiclif and 



346 LITERARY LIKINGS 

Chaucer. Thus, in the former's transla- 
tion of the New Testament, Matthew vi., 
7, we read : " But in praying, nyle ye 
speke much, as hethen men doon, for the 
gessen that they be herd in their myche 
speche." And in the Prologue to the 
Canterbury Tales, line 1182 runs as fol- 
lows : " A forster was he soothly, as I 
gesse." In the same way, we find even so 
great a scholar as the late E. A. Free- 
man, on hearing the word rare, as applied 
to underdone beef, used over here, jump- 
ing to the conclusion that this was an occi- 
dental locution, and much surprised when 
it was pointed out to him that Dryden has 
the word in this sense a couple of hundred 
years ago. Without further illustration, 
these two examples suggest an axiom 
which may be expressed, categorically, in 
this wise : The great majority of alleged 
Americanisms are survivals of older and 
excellent English which the Britons have 
allowed to fall into desuetude. It is very 
easy to be tricked in this matter, and the 
more study one makes of it the greater 
caution one is likely to exercise in decid- 
ing off-hand on a given word or idiom. 
A personal experience may be in order. 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 



347 



When the writer first ran across the plural 
noun humans in an American newspaper, 
he shuddered with horror. The headline 
A Heap of Humans, to describe the results 
of a railway accident, seemed to smack of 
the wild and woolly West so strongly, it 
had an effect of such slangy newness, that 
the simple act of consulting a good dic- 
tionary was scorned ; and it was only after 
meeting the word in Kipling, and later in 
the Derbyshire dialect of a generation ago, 
as written in David Grieve, that the word- 
use was seen to be English. Thereupon 
a reference to the Century Dictionary 
disclosed humans as popular with the 
Elizabethan dramatists. Bartlett, in his 
Dictionary of Americanisms, gives the word, 
thus slipping into a very easy error. 

Having set up, then, this first great 
principle, that a given Americanism in 
speech may be simply a retention of good 
English, the course of action of the seeker 
after truth is obvious when a dispute 
arises : find out if the word, phrase, idiom, 
be not a legitimate survival, and if it turn 
out to be (which it will, as stated, in a 
surprisingly large number of cases), why, 
then stick to it as defensible and quite 



348 LITERARY LIKINGS 

right. Whether it happen to be in Lon- 
don usage to-day or not matters not a 
whit. Moreover, it is the testimony of 
scholars, and of British scholars them- 
selves, that, as a whole, American English 
has preserved the archaisms of the parent 
speech with more care and good faith than 
the British English itself. This is a very 
remarkable phenomenon at first sight, but 
quite capable of explanation. A band of 
colonists, say, comes over to these shores 
in the early seventeenth century, and 
settles, bringing the speech uses of their 
time and whilom habitat ; inasmuch as the 
region these colonists live in is an un- 
peopled one, and they are, so to speak, a 
close community, their words and idioms 
will tend to persist, and, as a result, after 
a hundred years or so their speech will 
resemble that of their fatherland at the time 
they left it more nearly than will the 
speech of those left behind in England, who 
have been subjected to far more of outside 
and disparate influence. This is the reason 
why the language of the countryside is 
always more conservative, more flavorous 
of the past speech-life, than is the tongue 
of the town. Thus, New Englandisms 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 349 

will not seldom turn out to be Old Eng- 
landisms in disguise ; that is, with a clipped 
nervous pronunciation or a nasal drawl. 

But Americanisms in language do not 
have to be survivals of older English ex- 
pression in order to be impeccable. They 
may be revivals also, and yet quite as legit- 
imate. In the case of survivals, we have 
words which, in use among the English at 
the time the American colonists branched 
off from the mother-tree, were kept alive 
by the latter, while allowed to die by the 
former. By revivals, on the other hand, 
are meant those speech-uses once current, 
but allowed by English-speaking folk to 
be superseded by newer words, pushed into 
forgotten corners, yet treasured in literary 
monuments, and awaiting the perceptive 
eye and the deft hand to bring them again 
on the stage. These rehabilitations are 
the peculiar province of literature and 
scholarship ; and, owing to the renaissance 
of older English already mentioned, they 
are a marked feature of the present day. 
A moment's reflection will show that in 
this linguistic liberty the American has 
naturally as large a part and as clear a 
franchise as his British cousin. American 



35o LITERARY LIKINGS 

writers and speech-users, in the course of 
their commerce with the older English 
authors, may very well adopt words and 
phrases therefrom ; who shall gainsay 
them ? It is common property the Amer- 
ican has drawn upon, and he has simply 
been more assimilative than his kinsman 
across the water, in case the latter has not 
revived the word or idiom. There are 
men to-day in this country who read their 
one hundred lines of Beowulf in the origi- 
nal as a morning eye-opener ; Dr. Furness, 
of Philadelphia, reads a play of Shake- 
speare daily, it is said. With this sort of 
thing going on, it is not only natural, but 
inevitable, that the sturdy old resources of 
our tongue should serve as a stimulus to 
restore much that is fine and germane to 
our national instincts in speech, and which 
has been lying fallow, maybe, for centuries, 
waiting for the resurrecting hand. The 
tendency to fall back thus on native words 
and idioms which have been disesteemed 
in favor of Latin or romance substitutes 
may be seen in the poetry of William 
Morris, the prose of Freeman, the tales 
of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard 
Kipling ; or, with us, the poetry of Lanier 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 351 

furnishes an example, verse, with its lean- 
ing to the archaic, always preceding prose 
in this respect. A single example will suf- 
fice : For generations the word preface has 
been in vogue to denote an introduction 
to what follows ; but it is now no uncom- 
mon thing to find scholars using in its 
place the word forespeech, the pure English 
equivalent of the Latin preface. This is 
one of the revivals we have in mind ; and, 
obviously, it makes no difference whatever 
if it chance to be an American or a Brit- 
isher, an Anglo Indian or an Australian, 
who revives the acceptable locution. Such 
a one as the above commends itself at 
once to every perceptive handler of the 
tongue. The criticism that attacks such a 
procedure and dubs the result an " Ameri- 
canism," when it happens to originate on 
our soil, is wide of the mark and suffi- 
ciently amusing. One caution is, however, 
necessary. Before deciding that a word, 
phrase, or idiom is a revival in this way, 
rather than a survival, dictionaries, schol- 
ars, or the literature itself in all its mani- 
fold forms of dialect, slang, and technical 
usage, must be consulted ; only by a care- 
ful, lynx-eyed survey of the field can one 



352 LITERARY LIKINGS 

indulge in that perilous pleasure, a cock- 
sure judgment. For, over and over again, 
it will be found that what appears to be 
new-coined or revamped has in reality a 
steady local life somewhere within the 
broad lands where the English language is 
at home. 

But supposing an Americanism is not a 
survival of older and legitimate uses nor a 
revival due to assimilation of the earlier 
literature, even if it be a brand-new crea- 
tion, something that never was on sea or 
land, it will not be illegitimate or unac- 
ceptable necessarily ; not at all. If it obey 
the laws of the genius of our tongue, it 
may be both without sin and acceptable. 
But the occasion must demand it, and the 
man on hand be large enough to furnish 
it. With these conditions fulfilled, there 
is no more against neologisms made on 
American soil than there is against those 
made on British soil. In either case it is 
a question of need, taste, and knowledge. 
It is safe to make the assertion that to-day, 
what with the survivals, the revivals so 
fast appearing, and the constant accessions 
from all sides to the ranks of our English 
word army, as the scientific nomenclature 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 353 

is enriched by new discoveries, there is less 
necessity than ever before for' the minting 
of fresh coins of expression. Yet times 
and occasions there are which demand the 
creative fiat. 

Such a movement as the temperance 
cause gives us in this century the capital 
word teetotaller, so good a formation that 
it is fathered by both British and Amer- 
ican, though the weight of evidence favors 
our priority of use; while reconstruction 
days produced the spirited word scalawag, 
unquestionably originating here, even if it 
be traced back to a connection with the 
diminutive Shetland cattle known as scal- 
lowag. Or for an absolute creation, our 
socio-political life gives us come-outer, which 
immediately commends itself for native 
strength and fitness. And in the way of 
idiom, the colloquial come off, the serious dis- 
cussion of which may still provoke a smile, 
will on analysis be seen to be a vigorous 
formation entirely on the lines of historic 
construction and finding its literary proto- 
type in the Shakespearean go to, which 
once, beyond peradventure, had a con- 
notation as jocose as has the recent idiom 
at present to our ears. A decade hence it 



354 LITERARY LIKINGS 

will sound very different. How silly it 
would be to deny to some of these Amer- 
ican speech creations an equal right to 
existence with sundry British formations 
which also prove themselves legitimate off- 
spring, not bastards ! Something in the 
local conditions called for them and so they 
were born, and others in like manner will 
be, whether in the tight little isle or in the 
broad free ways of this western hemisphere. 
And notice of the new or low-born word 
or phrase of yesterday, that you are not in 
a position yet to say whether it will be 
ephemeral or become historic. The Brit- 
isher cannot pronounce ipse dixit upon it, 
for the very good reason that we Amer- 
icans cannot tell ourselves. The slang of 
to-day is the idiom of to-morrow : slang, 
indeed, being idiom in the making. It is 
evident now that dude will be read in the 
novels and essays of the better class by the 
future student who puzzles over our native 
speech traits ; it is duly recognized by the 
International Webster and the Century 
Dictionaries. But half a dozen years 
ago it was still doubtful coin as a legal 
tender. Under these circumstances, how 
absurd for the British censor to pass judg- 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 355 

ment on some fin de Steele speech-use in 
America on the ground that it is non-Brit- 
ish and vulgar. What he cavils at may be 
classic in the next generation ; or, although 
he may hit upon some word or idiom that 
is essentially canaille and never can be 
received as part and parcel of good Amer- 
ican usage, he is in no position to consti- 
tute himself a judge, inasmuch as inadmis- 
sible cockney slang is in evidence quite as 
palpably as the Bowery argot which offends 
his taste. The Londoner who calls his 
fellow a " bloody fool " is just as far from 
good English as the Yankee who playfully 
characterizes his mate as a " son-of-a-gun." 
In connection with this subject of slang, it 
is worth mentioning that in the power of 
making fit and forceful words on occasion 
the American, as every fair-minded student 
will admit, is remarkably happy. Prof. 
John Earle, one of the first living author- 
ities on English, and himself an English- 
man, has said that " in the utilizing of 
slang by giving it an artistic value, Amer- 
ican literature seems to enjoy a peculiar 
prerogative.' ' Orthoepy makes a large 
division of the general subject of English 
speech, and • with American English in 



356 LITERARY LIKINGS 

mind, a remark or two must be made about 
our pronunciation in relation to that of 
the Briton. Here again historic phonetics 
and the laws of linguistic development gov- 
erning the evolution of the English tongue 
as a whole must be consulted and answer 
given accordingly. Owing to climatic and 
resultant physiological reasons, owing per- 
haps to the freer mingling of races on our 
shores, English in the mouth of Americans 
has a sound not always tallying with the 
same words spoken on the other side of 
the big pond. And on the whole, let it 
be admitted frankly that the vowel qual- 
ities heard from our cousins are richer and 
more musical than our own. Therefore, 
when the broad a sound is taught in the 
schools or at home as a substitute for the 
higher, thinner, intensely cacophonous 
vowel heard in the noun calf on the lips 
of the New England rustic, exactly the cor- 
rect thing is being done ; for the broad a 
not only makes for euphony, but is his- 
torically right phonetics. It does not 
smack of Briton worship to favor it, unless 
it be favored for the sole reason that it has 
the London hall-mark. But in some other 
of his orthoepic characteristics, the Briton 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 357 

is slovenly and reprehensive : as where he 
slurs over a syllable in order to pronounce 
conservatory as if he wrote it conservfry. 

For an American to imitate him here 
shows a beautiful commingling of the 
dunce and the sycophant. The matter of 
accent in English is one which most peo- 
ple find bothersome, and are conscious of 
insecurity about : a fact witnessed to by 
the frequent appeals to those in authority 
and the puzzlement following on dis- 
agreement among the dictionary-makers. 
There is, however, one great general law 
of accent at work in English speech which, 
once in the mind, will keep the American 
from ever stretching out imploring hands 
for help from England, as if the decision 
must come thence to be of avail. The law 
is this : Accent in English is recessive, it 
tends to work back to the root syllable, 
or even further, to the first syllable, when 
the word happens to be foreign and the 
root does not coincide with the first sylla- 
ble, as it does with native English words. 
This law of recessive accent in our tongue 
— in sharp contrast with a tongue like the 
Persian, for example, where the accent is 
progressive, or tends to fall on the final 



358 LITERARY LIKINGS 

syllable, as Istaphan — will prove an ever- 
present help in time of trouble if it is 
applied in questions of accentuation, when 
Webster and Worcester breed confusion 
it may be, and British usage makes con- 
fusion worse confounded. To illustrate : 
If a pronunciation like decorative suddenly 
appears, and makes an effort to force 
itself into polite society in the phrase, 
" The Decorative Art Society/' we may 
promptly squelch it, without stopping to 
ask by your leave, since it tries to force 
forward by one syllable the accent of a 
thoroughly anglicized word, where the 
stress had already reached the first syl- 
lable (y^orative) and there rested. Just 
in proportion as a word borrowed from 
foreign sources has become true-blue Eng- 
lish, so that we write it without italics, will 
it be found conserving this irresistible ten- 
dency ; in some few instances euphony 
comes in to make exceptions (as in poly- 
syllabic words), but the general principle 
may be postulated without any fear of 
contradiction. ' If American or Britisher, 
then, violate this law, the sin must be laid 
at the door of the sinner ; it is utterly illog- 
ical and silly for the former to cry par- 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 359 

don of the latter, it being the business of 
each to obey the law, the law they are both 
subject to. 

These few principles, upon which Am- 
erican English can be and should be de- 
fended and is to be judged, will lead us, it 
is to be hoped, to the conclusion that an 
independence born of a scholarly and 
broad-minded view of the case should be 
cultivated by every patriotic and thought- 
ful man and woman in these United States. 

Neither Anglophobia nor Anglomania 
need influence us here, but the facts should 
be followed and our position reasoned out. 
And in conclusion we may formulate ex- 
plicitly what has been, all through our 
argument, an implicit assumption ; namely, 
good English has no meaning except in re- 
lation to the country in which it is spoken. 
There is no such thing as good English 
in the abstract ; in England the English 
heard in the mouths of the most culti- 
vated people, or written by the most reputa- 
ble makers of literature, is the norm and 
standard. In America exactly the same 
holds true. To assume that we must look to 
London for our model is to acknowledge 
that the English speech has degenerated as 



360 LITERARY LIKINGS 

wielded by the English colonists and their 
descendants. And since degeneration of 
speech can only come from degeneration of 
character, the inference is that the English 
stock is in a bad way in these parts. But 
the quality of the original settlers, the stuff 
that they showed to be in them in the 
troublous colonial and revolutionary days 
and in later days of war and peace, to- 
gether with our present proud position 
among the nations of civilization, suffice 
to answer such a preposterous notion. Am- 
erican English is to-day a distinct variation 
of British English, and for the same rea- 
son that French, Italian, Spanish, and the 
other Romance tongues are variants of the 
mother Latin tongue. Dialectical differen- 
tiations always arise where a homogeneous 
language sends out branches to other parts 
of the earth ; and, logically, it is as absurd 
to fault or depreciate the speech of the 
United States for its divergences from 
British uses as it would be to take excep- 
tion to the language of Leopardi, Hugo, 
and Valera, because it is not Ciceronian 
Latin. The only difference is that in the 
case of Romance peoples a much longer 
time has elapsed since they split off from 



AMERICAN ENGLISH 361 

Rome, and so the changes are more strik- 
ing. In the case of American English, 
too, the centripetal forces of modern social 
life will forbid ours ever becoming a dis- 
tinct tongue. But room there will always 
be for individual freedom and national 
independence in this matter of speech, and 
that American who fears to exercise these 
democratic privileges is not only laying 
himself open to the charge of ignorance : 
he is forfeiting his birthright as well. 



Literature for Children 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 



THE key-note of modern education 
is found in the right instruction of 
children. The acceptance and spread of 
the kindergarten idea may be said to have 
revolutionized our notions in respect of 
this problem, and from this as a central 
principle and efficient cause all betterment 
of pedagogic methods in the higher grades 
of school and college and university life 
has come. Touching these subsequent 
periods, the most important and signifi- 
cant change in the conception of the 
proper grading and relative value of 
studies is the recognition of English (in 
the broad sense) as a natural centre of 
culture for an English-speaking person. 
It is coming to be felt that education in 
the English language, literature, and life, 
for purposes of vital broadening and en- 
richment, is of pronounced importance 
for those who speak the tongue. As a 



366 LITERARY LIKINGS 

result, in our manifold institutions of 
learning the English course is given more 
time, more attention, and more dignity as 
a branch of work. All who keep abreast 
of modern pedagogic thought are aware of 
this. 

And along with the changed attitude 
towards English goes a wiser apprecia- 
tion of the use of literature in this study ; 
a tendency to make literary instruction 
more dominant and to introduce it at an 
earlier period of the school life, postpon- 
ing the purely analytic studies — of which 
grammar is a type — to a later time. 
The banner cry of those leaders who 
have at heart the interests of the pri- 
mary and intermediate grades now seems 
to be : " Not facts — ideals ;" a phrase the 
sentiment of which is revolutionary to the 
older notions. Psychology has taught us 
that the intuitive emotional impressions 
can be received best at a comparatively 
tender age ; and such are the very impres- 
sions imparted by the early contact with 
noble literature. The plastic sensibilities 
are ready for the effect of poetry and im- 
aginative prose ; all that stands for the 
heart-side and the soul-side of literature 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 367 

may to the best advantage be inculcated 
during that receptive hour of childhood 
when the good can be appreciated, though 
mayhap it cannot be explained. It is a 
splendid victory that has been won in the 
grasping and engrossing of this idea : in- 
stead of the three R's of the old-time 
educational dispensation we have substi- 
tuted the three H's, — the hand, the 
head, and the heart, — each to be trained, 
all to be interrelated ; the manual, men- 
tal, and emotional evoked in the organic 
unity which is properly theirs. 

This shift and broadening of ideals is 
a main cause for rejoicing. The thesis, 
then, that the best literature is none too 
good for young children in the school or 
in the home, that to stimulate the imagi- 
nation and awaken the soul through the 
gracious ministries of song and story and 
soul revelation is of more importance 
than the memorizing of dates or the util- 
ities of the multiplication-table, is pretty 
well established. One who undertakes to 
argue for the making of early instruction 
in literature ethical and inspirational rather 
than analytic and knowing, has his audi- 
ence with him as it never would have been 



368 LITERARY LIKINGS 

a generation ago. We now regard educa- 
tion not so much as an attempt to fill up a 
scholar with facts and figures, or to prepare 
him for money-getting but rather as the 
drawing forth of the powers in such sym- 
metry that the moral and spiritual faculties 
shall be given precedence of those intellect- 
ual. Hence the emphasis put upon the 
efficacy of early ideals and the fruitful influ- 
ence of great literature which, by the very 
condition of its greatness, is a power that 
makes for spiritual quickening. 

But what are the best methods in bring- 
ing about this precious nurture of children 
through contact with the word-work and 
the soul-work of poets, orators, drama- 
tists, and weavers of story ? What litera- 
ture shall be given them, and how and 
when ? 

At the outset we must contradistinguish 
between boys and girls. Boys like action, 
adventure ; they run to the sensational, 
even truculent, in reading ; girls, per contra, 
like the domestic, that which centres about 
the family affections and the sweet minis- 
tries of home. This is a broad generaliza- 
tion. Girls there may be who have a fond- 
ness for Tom Brown s School Days, boys 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 369 

who admire Little Women. But the 
distinction holds, and it suggests at once 
the disadvantage of a public school where 
sex in literary or other education must be 
ignored more or less. Of course, there 
are to-day those who see no sex in the 
thought-processes and emotions of young 
people of opposite sexes — who indeed go 
further and regard mind-stuff as sexless 
throughout life. Such will pooh-pooh at 
my notion. But to the present writer the 
willingness to overlook or the practical 
inability to recognize such claims shows 
shallow thinking. Great laws of nature 
arraign themselves against puny man 
here. 

But, waiving this point, it may be re- 
marked that the fast-growing inclination 
to give children pieces of literature in 
the whole, instead of by scraps in the ex- 
cerpts of earlier days, is an excellent good 
thing. A piece of literature is an organ- 
ism and should therefore be put before the 
scholar, no matter how young, with its 
head on, and standing on both feet. This 
idea is now generally acted upon ; witness 
the enormous growth of text-books pre- 
senting literary masterpieces in their en- 



37© LITERARY LIKINGS 



tirety — or if this is not done, at least in 
substance keeping to the organic struct- 
ure. Certain critics of the inner circle 
affect to sneer at this tendency. Andrew 
Lang, for example, laments what he deems 
the Bowdlerization and cheapening of the 
classics, an objection whimsical enough and 
hardly becoming in one who has been 
dubbed, facetiously, Editor-in-General to 
the British public. Nor must the moral 
aspect of the editing of literature be over- 
looked — this, too, provocative of cult- 
ured sneers. Mr. Howells has written 
true and noble words on this : " I hope 
the time will come," says he, (C when the 
beast-man will be so far subdued and 
tamed in us that the memory of him in 
literature shall be left to perish ; that what 
is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall 
be kept out of such editions as are meant 
for general reading, and that the pedant- 
pride which now perpetuates it as an es- 
sential part of those poets shall no longer 
have its way. At the end of the ends 
such things do defile ; they do corrupt." 
It is well to get such testimony from a 
captain of letters. 

In view of all this preparation of stand- 



n 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 371 

ard writings for the young, there is little 
excuse for putting children off with the 
second-best and the well-enough. The 
choicest is none too good. The dominant 
division, fiction, for instance, now includes 
Mrs. Molesworth, Mrs. Gatty, Mrs. 
Ewing, Mrs. Burnett, Mrs. Wiggin, 
Harris and Page, Stevenson and Kipling, 
and a score more, these names being set 
down almost at random. The pabulum 
furnished us children of a larger growth 
by Optic and Alger and Mayne Reid 
has been superseded by more heavenly 
food. And the older aristocracy of child 
literature still makes its appeal in books 
like Robinson Crusoe and Kingsley's Water 
Babies, to mention two that stand for 
many. Inasmuch as the spiritually beau- 
tiful, as we have said, is the most de- 
sirable of all, books of this sort should 
come first in favor — beginning with the 
Bible. Not the didactic, goody-goody 
stuff which made the old-time Sunday- 
school library too often a place of tears 
and penance for healthy-minded young 
folk. The day is clean gone by for the 
tales wherein the bad boy who goes a-fish- 
ing on the Sabbath gets not fish, but a 



372 LITERARY LIKINGS 

flogging, to be triumphed over most un- 
Christianly by the good little boy who 
didn't go — probably because he daren't. 
No, I mean that which is lovely, inspira- 
tional literature, where the artistic and the 
ethical are recognized for the kinsmen 
they are, linked by the subtlest, sweetest, 
strongest of ties. And at the very head 
and forefront of such-like books the Bible 
must be placed. The Bible, in judicious 
selections, not gulped down whole, is pre- 
eminently a book for literary and ethical 
stimulation. We hear much of the Bible 
as literature nowadays, and Professor 
Moulton's most suggestive volume is 
symptomatic, summarizing well a changed 
attitude, a truer philosophy. A new 
interest in, a deeper love towards, the 
Scriptures are thus born. Once concede 
this use of the Book, and the question of 
its function in the school is settled. It 
should have its place there, along with 
other great literature, as a quickener of 
the sense of beauty and the sense of right. 
To make it a theological text-book is 
monstrous, and if its daily presence among 
the pupils meant denominational teaching 
or propagandism we would have none of 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 373 

it. But regard the Bible as a composite, a 
wonderful repository of history, prophecy, 
song, story, drama, and naive people- 
science, matchless in expression and sur- 
charged with the ethic temper, and its 
exclusion were suicidal. Better for many 
of us had we been made in the school, yes, 
and in the nursery, to commit to memory 
long passages and chosen parts of the Old 
and New Testaments — as did the young 
John Ruskin, it will be remembered ; that 
gre,at man's testimony to the potent influ- 
ence upon him of the Book being worth 
repeating always : <c Walter Scott and 
Pope's Homer were reading of my own 
selection, but my mother forced me, by 
steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of 
the Bible by heart ; as well as to read every 
syllable through aloud, hard names and 
all, from Genesis to Apocalypse, about 
once a year ; and to that discipline — 
patient, accurate, and resolute — I owe 
not only a knowledge of the Book which 
I find occasionally serviceable, but much 
of my general power of taking pains and 
the best part of my taste in literature. 
From Walter Scott's novels I might easily, 
as I grew older, have fallen to other 



374 LITERARY LIKINGS 

peopled novels, and Pope might perhaps 
have led me to take Johnson's English, 
or Gibbon's, as types of language; but, 
once knowing the 3 2d of Deuteronomy, 
the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corin- 
thians, the Sermon on the Mount, and 
most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by 
heart, and having always a way of think- 
ing with myself what words meant, it was 
not possible for me, even in the foolishest 
times of youth, to write entirely superficial 
or formal English." And again he declares 
of this experience that he counts it " very 
confidently the most precious and, on the 
whole, the one essential part of all my 
education." 

This mention of the memorizing of 
Scripture by one of the masters of pure 
style leads on to the remark that in bring- 
ing children into contact with the great 
literature of the world the habit of com- 
mitting to memory is most fruitful. The 
storing of the mind with choice passages 
will prove a godsend in after years — will 
yield good, I incline to think, even if it 
be done parrot-like at the time. The 
pedagogic tendency now is in all branches 
to teach independence of speech rather 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 375 

than the mechanically memorized lesson. 
In the literature of knowledge (science) 
no doubt the danger lies in the latter ; 
but in the literature of power, which we 
are here considering, the memory is a 
trusty and valued servant who guards us 
from the loss of veritable treasure. How 
many of us in mature life can testify to 
the comfort and help and uplift that has 
come from stray fragments of poem or 
essay or oration learned years before, 
perhaps in childhood ! Often, when we 
are separated from books, listless, distrait, 
sick, they have been evangels bringing 
pure, sweet, and noble images and a 
quickened spirit. 

But now, lumping boys and girls to- 
gether — which, though bad psychology, 
seems, so far as the school goes, to be 
necessary — and admitting the major 
premise that great literature should be 
given them and given them early, a few 
more specific remarks may be made. 
There is considerable choice, within the 
category of great literature, of what is 
wisest to use. Divers kinds of fish come 
into this drag-net. I apprehend that in 
the intellectual and spiritual gradation 



376 LITERARY LIKINGS 

from youth to maturity the objective lit- 
erature, the literature of action and char- 
acter and picturesqueness, rather than that 
,vhich is subjective, will be best adapted 
to the purpose. Hence fiction of the 
Walter Scott and Stevenson kind will be 
given preference over that of Thackeray 
and George Eliot. In poetry, the epic, 
the ballad, and the lyric of simple song 
will prove better than the reflective piece 
or the purely descriptive. History on 
the personal, graphic side — treating it as 
Carlyle conceived it to be, the story of 
great men — is good for the little ones 
and most affected by them. Dickens* 
Child' s History of England, whatever its 
faults, has the shining merit of grasping 
this fact. So, of course, biography will 
attract more than the essay proper, for 
example (and still more the essay im- 
proper), that form being food for the 
adult digestion. I should conclude that 
a child who liked Charles Lamb's papers 
or, to mention a latter-day author, Agnes 
Repplier's, needed to be sent out into the 
open, with orders to ride a wheel or play 
golf or tennis. Certainly the preference 
would seem alarmingly priggish, though 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 377 

such children exist, it may be, as do three- 
headed pigs and other abnormalities. 
Speaking broadly, it is amazing how 
children of the healthy, normal, matter-of- 
fact sort like literature that is alive, whole- 
some, having sentiment, not sentimen- 
tality, and some narrative human interest. 
As a rule, they relish it. I once experi- 
mented with a boy who hated the very 
word " literature," and whose soul was 
completely absorbed in football and track 
athletics. I read to him, in course, 
Homer's Odyssey, in Palmer's fine prose 
translation, a canto a night. The result 
was he imitated Oliver Twist, calling for 
more in case I flagged. And yet this was 
a lad of the unliterary age of fifteen, who 
could not abide the mere mention of 
poetry. But naturally enough he fell in 
love with the wanderings of that fine old 
buccaneer Ulysses ; naturally enough he 
liked to hear about the Cyclops and the 
Sirens, and all the rest of it. The smell 
of the sea was in it all, and the smack of 
adventure and the magic of marvel. Be 
assured that the reader did not damage 
his case by telling the boy beforehand 
that here was a master poem. That had 



378 LITERARY LIKINGS 

been a stupid letting the cat out of the 
bag. Get the story going, and all is well : 
the world of children loves a story as the 
grown-up world is said to love a lover. 

Then if we come to discriminate between 
prose and poetry, the former must be given 
the preference with young folk in mind, 
and the latter administered only in homoe- 
opathic doses. Here again the sexes dif- 
ferentiate : girls, as a class, care more for 
poetry than boys, as indeed do women 
more than men. Poetry, broadly speak- 
ing, is more subjective and elusive than 
prose, hence it is less adapted to the im- 
mature comprehension. Yet verse on its 
musical side, with its alliteration and rhyme, 
its rhythm and picture-making, has often 
a great fascination for children, as mothers 
many will testify; and an acquaintance with 
this, the highest form of literature, should 
be inculcated at a tender age, as likely to 
be of paramount service in creating ideals 
and developing the sense of beauty. The 
slow gradations by which this may be 
effected is a test of the nicest skill of the 
educator. The road from the Mother 
Goose jingles to the dramatic monologues 
of a Browning is a long, but not necessarily 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 379 

a weary one. Prof. William J. Rolfe, in 
his recent excellent little work The Ele- 
mentary Study of English, advocates the 
use of poetry in the grammar-school grade. 
" Let me suggest," he says, " that the 
critical study of some masterpiece of litera- 
ture, especially poetry, is one of the best 
possible exercises for the teacher in this 
department. It may or may not be some- 
thing that one has to teach in school, — it 
is well, in my opinion, that it should be 
something above the range of one's daily 
work, — but the manner of study is of 
more importance than the matter." The 
work will prove, he thinks, for the pupil 
of this age, " at once a delightful recreation 
and valuable self-culture." 

Some principle in choosing out of the 
whole corpus liter aricum the literature which 
can be grasped and enjoyed by the young 
is important, in order to avoid a false sen- 
timentality, which too often plays about 
this subject. I refer to that misconcep- 
tion which sees the child not as it really is, 
but as it appears through the illusion of 
our mature sentiment. Perhaps the finest 
expression in poetry of this view is found in 
Wordsworth's peerless ode on the Intima- 



380 LITERARY LIKINGS 

tions of Immortality in Early Childhood. 
That this is a superlative piece of English 
poetry we all know; fewer, I fear, have 
realized that its psychology is very du- 
bious. If the poet had presented the child 
as caught up in and by his affection, trans- 
muted into something which had all the 
beauty and innocence of youth with the 
high thought that comes with years, he 
had been acceptable. But to impute to 
the child per se a kind of angelhood is es- 
sentially untrue. Boys and girls do not 
have those shadowy intimations, nor do 
they come trailing garments of glory from 
on high. These little ones' helplessness 
and loveliness and trusting lack of guile 
constitute the most winsome appeal on 
earth to older folk. It is right and seemly 
to overflow with feeling about children. 
But Wordsworth goes further : he says, 
practically, that the child is nearer high, 
pure, and wondrous things than the man, 
which contradicts all science and common- 
sense. The brutal fact is that your nor- 
mal child, sound of mind and limb, is, 
in comparison with what he may hopefully 
come to be, a healthy little animal ; more 
selfish in a naive way; more absorbed in 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 381 

practical and carnal matters, and not a bit 
interested in supernal affairs.' Our child 
literature, therefore, must be chosen with 
this truth — palatable or otherwise — in 
mind ; if it is not so chosen, we shall get 
in a fog. We must, on the contrary, work 
gradually from the concrete towards the 
abstract ideal, always seeing to it that the 
lesson in the most objective bit of litera- 
ture be wholesome and holy. The ethic 
quality may be as strong, be it remem- 
bered, in the straightforward story of 
narration as in the pious preachment ; the 
sermon may be there, though hidden 
in the envelopment of art, — the reader 
being all unwillingly influenced by what 
George Eliot calls the " slow contagion of 
good." I knew a teacher in a Sunday- 
school who was looked at askance by some 
of the members because, after the more 
serious matters were successfully dis- 
patched, he read to his class of urchins 
Aldrich's little masterpiece, The Story of 
a Bad Boy. But I am sure it did them 
good (the attendance showed it interested 
them) ; and equally sure that the Sunday- 
school library is impoverished ethically 



382 LITERARY LIKINGS 

and otherwise which does not include that 
particular volume. 

The difficulty of discrimination in schools 
in the matter of literature for boys and 
girls was spoken of: all other discrimina- 
tions — that between backward and for-, 
ward pupils, for example — are also dif- 
ficult wherever children are taught and 
studied en masse. This suggests the noble 
function, the superlative importance, of 
the home in purveying literature to the 
little ones. Thus the child can get that 
individual attention, that loving study, as 
a detached personal problem, which, from 
its very nature, is beyond the province of 
the school. Those schools which are fa- 
mous the world over for their fruitful meth- 
ods — one thinks of Froebel and Pesta- 
lozzi — have taken their cue from the 
home. The kindergarten, in sooth, is an 
adaptation of the playground and nursery. 
No wonder it is being emphasized that 
mothers are the first teachers; that is, 
teachers not by rule, but from the nature 
of their inherent relation to the child; 
amateurs, not in the sense of ignorance, 
but lovers of the task. What may not 
parents in the environment of the home 



LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 383 

accomplish for the cause of higher educa- 
tion ! " With the mothers, and fathers too, 
aroused to the fact that they are teachers," 
says Prof. James P. Munroe, in his stim- 
ulating work on The Educational I deal > 
"and that the home is a school-house; 
with the study which they must increas- 
ingly give, under this new light, to that 
complex organism, the child ; with the 
psychological and psychical sciences resting 
upon data which shall be thus collected 
— the day for a rapid growth in educa- 
tional methods is not far distant. . . 
Having, after centuries of wandering, 
brought the child back to his proper 
atmosphere, the home, having determined 
who shall be responsible for his teaching 
and what shall be the final aim of that 
teaching, we have, indeed, put the educa- 
tional question upon a sound and healthy 
basis. We have at last learned how to 
follow nature, and we are beginning to 
understand that the best education, in- 
deed the only right education, is a natural 
one." 

So, in this matter of literature for the 
young, the influence of the home teaching 
is enormous ; all the school can do pales 



908*? 451 



384 LITERARY LIKINGS 

before it. Let the mother add to the 
poet's rhyme the music of her soft voice 
and beloved tone; let great fiction be read 
to the breathless group of curly heads 
about the fire; and the wonders of sci- 
ence be unrolled, the thrilling scenes and 
splendid personalities of history displayed. 
Children thus inspired may be trusted to 
become sensitive to literature long before 
they know what the word means or have 
ratiocinated at all upon their mental experi- 
ence. It is comforting to reflect that a 
mother, a parent, wishing in our day to 
do this for the nearest and dearest, is 
helped as never before: by enlightened 
librarians and libraries of generous habits; 
by child literature from the best authors 
of our time ; by plenty of good criticism 
furnishing a lamp to the seeker's feet. 
Children are lucky to be children nowa- 
days, for the idea is pretty well dissemi- 
nated that the choicest from all the gar- 
nered riches of the great world of liter- 
ature should be given them, that they may 
early be possessed of thoughts and feelings 
that are true and large, sweet and beautiful. 










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